The New Old Taylor

The venerable (read: old and stale) video game World of Warcraft has in recent years enjoyed some renewed interest, ironically, by releasing a "classic" version that recreated the state of the game circa 2006, prior to all the additions and streamlining introduced in subsequent expansions. Each expansion can be thought of as an era in the game's life, and the prospect of traveling back in time to the first age has proven appealing both to latecomers wishing to experience some storied legacy content for themselves, and also for nostalgic veterans wanting to return to the game as they remember it from its peak. And it's not just a frozen moment in time. The classic version of WoW is now starting to progress through those subsequent eras, so its players may very well get to relive, at an accelerated pace, the entire history of the game, before it ultimately catches up to and converges again with its modern incarnation.

To be clear, WoW did not pioneer the idea of classic or "progression" versions of games. As it has since its conception, it just copied an existing game and did the same thing with a larger budget to much greater success. And classic versions of WoW specifically were something its players had been requesting for years, and had in fact already created unofficially on their own. But though the concept had been around, it had always perplexed me as, in essence, an exercise in willful regression, whose charm was lost on me. That is, until now that Taylor Swift is essentially doing it in the music industry with her "Taylor's Version" re-recordings of her first six studio albums.

Officially, the impetus for the re-recordings was Swift's desire to produce master versions of her back catalog that she would fully own, as a way to get around having to play ball with whomever has possession of the original recordings. With the goal of supplanting the originals, she has kept the re-recordings indistinguishable from them to all but the most scrutinizing ears, which at first would not seem the most artistically exciting prospect for listeners not invested in her ownership saga.

For the two thus-far-released re-recording albums—Fearless and Red—Swift has seized creative opportunities to dig out of the vault previously unreleased songs from each era. Indeed, even if the re-recorded tracks held no interest, there is enough added material to make each album feel substantial and worthwhile.

The most publicized addition, actually a bit of both a re-recording and a vault track, has been a 10-minute version of Red's "All Too Well." Although the original version of the breakup ballad has come to be regarded by many as Swift's magnum opus, I could barely recall it when "All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor's Version) (From The Vault)" intriguingly appeared atop my Spotify Release Radar playlist last Friday. I enjoyed Swift's music when Red released in 2012, but not to the extent that I ever purchased any records or listened to an album straight through, so "All Too Well" was easily overlooked as a relative deep cut, compared to high-charting singles "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," "I Knew You Were Trouble," and "22."

Ashamedly, I think my initial reaction to seeing the words "10 Minute Version" was to scoff at the notion of doubling the length of a Taylor Swift song to contrive out of it some pop "Free Bird." But this song IS freaking epic! By around the 4-minute mark, it had humbled me as few works of art ever have. By the end of my first listen, it had cemented for me Swift's place as one of the all-time singer-songwriter stars.

But more than any single new discovery, the real treat of these re-recordings is having an occasion to revisit and reexamine these eras in Swift's career. Fearless was the album that elevated her to mainstream chart-topping superstardom back in 2008, so she has been a force in music for over a decade. She followed that with a string of three albums, including Red, against which one would have to be cognitively on another planet to argue for anyone but her as the artist of the 2010's.

Nevertheless, in some circles, it would not be until the surprise mid-pandemic release of the experimental Folklore in 2020 that Swift would produce an indie record cool enough to legitimize her songwriting chops. In the post-Folklore world of enhanced estimation for her as an artist, and apart from any distractions in her public life and persona that might once have motivated a less enlightened generation of critics to want to take her down a peg, now with her back catalog suddenly topping the charts again, the cool kids can finally unironically appreciate the music of those earlier works for what it has always been—be it the impeccable hooks and pop melodies of "You Belong with Me," or the lyrical command and masterful narrative imagery of "All Too Well" that prefigured 2020 Swift.

For many longtime fans, meanwhile, these albums represent peak Taylor Swift. We didn't need the reminder, but we're glad for it anyway. And I think I get now why World of Warcraft players wanted a classic version. Even in cases where past content might still have been accessible (just as Swift's back catalog has remained readily available to listen to at any time), it wouldn't have been the same experiencing it through the modern version, where successive generations of shiny new things have rendered the old trivial and obsolete. No, when people share stories of "back in the day," you want to experience it as it actually was back in the day. Most of all, you want to recapture the thrill of when the old was new and exciting, and everybody was talking about it. That's the feeling I get whenever one of these "new old Taylor" releases takes over Spotify, SNL, and every culture and entertainment blog I follow.

In fact, now I wish Swift and other artists as well would start doing this as a regular feature. World of Warcraft has begun to progress the classic version onward through different eras of the game, but it seems likely this will be a cyclical thing, with new doors to the old world opening up for more tours of the past. There will always be people wanting to go back to the original, after all, either because they missed it the last time around, or because the newer stuff just doesn't compare for them. Similarly, after Swift finishes taking us on this journey through her past eras, I would not object to starting it all over again at some point.

Ashes to Ashes, Funk to Funky

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If I could choose any song to be my entrance theme, it would be David Bowie's "Rebel Rebel."

And when I pass, I want "Space Oddity" playing me out.

Goodbye, Starman. You blew our minds.

How well did Taylor Hicks really perform at Evo 2013?

The competitive Super Smash Bros. community was abuzz last week with the report that Internet-famous Bill Trinen, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Nintendo of America (and also Shigeru Miyamoto’s interpreter), would be at Evo 2015 next month competing in the 2,000-player Super Smash Bros. for Wii U tournament.

Trinen will be the most notable quasi-celeb to compete at Evo since American Idol Season 5 winner Taylor Hicks placed 257th in Super Smash Bros. Melee at Evo 2013. Speaking of which, although it’s uncertain whether Hicks has any idea who Bill Trinen is, he was nevertheless moved to respond on Twitter at the suggestion that Trinen might perform better than Hicks did two years ago.

https://twitter.com/TaylorHicks/status/617025620967448576

Evo 2013’s Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament reportedly drew approximately 700 entrants, so many news outlets that picked up the story saw Hicks’s 257th-place finish as quite respectable. As GameSpot observed at the time, “Hicks finished better than most.”

But did he really?

Many reports seemed to misunderstand Hicks’s placing to mean that he outperformed 443 out of 700 competitors, which would, indeed, be impressive for a non-pro player at the world’s biggest fighting game tournament. But that’s not what the results actually mean.

In an elimination-format tournament, every competitor does not play against every other competitor. Rather, they are paired off, so that, for example, 32 players are distributed into 16 one-on-one matchups occurring simultaneously (maybe not literally at the same time, but in the same round, at any rate). The winners move on to the next round, while the losers are eliminated, effectively halving the field after each round, until the final two are left to compete for the championship. For any fan of professional tennis or anyone who follows team sports playoffs, this should all be very familiar.

The key point here is that all of the players eliminated in the same round finish with the same result. In other words, there will be ties—not for 1st or 2nd place, no, but for the lower ranks, and more and more the further down you go. Most fighting game tournaments utilize a double-elimination format, as opposed to the single-elimination format common among professional sports. The relevant difference is that double-elimination tournaments produce fewer ties, but there are ties even so. Two players will tie for 5th place, four for 9th place, eight for 17th place, sixteen for 33rd, and so on.

Do you begin to see what this means for Taylor Hicks’s 257th-place finish? It means he tied with a crapload of other players. But let’s actually do the math and get more specific. Below are the number of players that tie for each place in a double-elimination tournament:



As you can see above, I also noted the total number of players accounted for, top-to-bottom, at each placing. Thus, with his 257th-place finish (tied with 127 other people), Taylor Hicks finished in the top 384 out of 700, behind 256 players and ahead of 316. So it’s not exactly accurate to say that Hicks finished “better than most.” That would be like someone placing 4,097th in a 6,000-person tournament and pretending that meant they finished ahead of some 2,000 people, when the reality is that they tied with those 2,000 for dead last. But you also can’t say Hicks finished in the bottom half either. He was in a broad middle range, which is unfortunately as precise as we can get with the double-elimination format.

That’s still pretty respectable, right? Well, in the rightmost column above, I also included an “adjusted rank” that I feel more intelligibly conveys each placing’s relative position in the overall order. In a 700-person tournament, there are 19 possible placings. Out of those 19, Hicks’s 257th-place finish was 17th best, or third-to-last. That’s pretty close to the bottom, but, again in fairness, the lower ranks are considerably fuller than the higher, so he was in plentiful company.

Or maybe the most sensible way to put it is to say that, in order to have placed 257th, Hicks needed to have progressed through two rounds. That is, he must have won two matches. And, since this was a double-elimination tournament, he must have lost twice. So his final record would have been 2-2. For a tournament the caliber of Evo, I’d say going 2-2 is definitely respectable for any amateur participant, let alone an easy-to-ridicule middle-aged full-time musician with no documented history as a gamer.

Except that, even after Evo 2013, there exists virtually no record of him ever having played Super Smash Bros. Melee!

You won’t find his name on any list of final tournament results. Partly, that’s because ordinarily nobody would ever bother to report results beyond 49th place (because who the hell cares?!). (I mean, in the real world of professional sports, nobody even cares who finishes 3rd, which is maybe why the "tied for 17th" concept may seem a bit foreign even to avid followers of sports playoffs.)

Hicks’s name is also not listed anywhere in the official tournament bracket. It’s known that the online bracket is not 100 percent complete; the posted bracket initially did not include day-of on-site registrants (which is why we don’t have an exact count for the number of entrants), so maybe some names in the first round were never posted. Some of those “Byes” listed in the brackets were definitely filled in with actual players by the time the tournament began. Maybe Hicks, who was working a residency at Paris Las Vegas at the time, just stumbled into the Evo ballroom at the same venue, and decided, on a lark, to request a last-minute entry into the Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament. If it was that spontaneous, that would also explain why there was zero buzz before the event about an American Idol winner registering to compete at Evo.

But if Hicks really did go 2-2, that should have been enough progress to have been reflected in the brackets somewhere. Yet there is no unnamed player anywhere in the bracket who ended up going 2-2. The only “Byes” who made progress through the tournament were in pools B60 and E62, but those unidentified players both went 3-2. Every other entrant with two wins or more was named and accounted for. If Hicks was somewhere in there, it would have had to have been under an alias, which admittedly is not outside the realm of believability.

But then there’s also the matter of there not being any footage anywhere of Hicks competing, no photos, no anecdotes whatsoever from anybody who played against him or even just saw him play. It is possible that Hicks’s demographic is simply too far removed from the sorts of people who would go to Evo to play Super Smash Bros. Melee, so maybe nobody there had any idea that he was anybody famous. Still, in this day and age of everybody having a smartphone to take pictures or live-tweet their experiences, this total lack of any record is just strange. The only proof anywhere that Hicks was there is this tweet by Seth Killian, which every other report on the topic can be sourced back to:

https://twitter.com/sethkillian/status/356565201589526528

Sure enough, that’s Taylor Hicks with an Evo badge around his neck. So why didn’t anybody else spot him during the tournament?

Keep in mind, Seth Killian is someone with ties to the production side of the video game industry (he was a lead designer at Sony Santa Monica at the time, and had worked on Street Fighter IV before that) and even deeper ties to Evo (on his LinkedIn page, he lists himself as a founder, and, to this day, he still does commentary for the Street Fighter tournaments). My only point is that publicity would actually be a consideration for Killian; this wasn’t just a "Soul Patrol" member randomly running into Taylor Hicks at Evo (although Killian might have been that too). Maybe Killian caught Hicks after a show and was able to convince him to wear the Evo badge and pose for a picture, then afterward made up (maybe as a joke) the story that Hicks entered the tournament.

Finally, even supposing Taylor Hicks really did enter the Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament, we have no idea the quality of the players he beat. Remember that Evo is an open-entry tournament. It attracts the strongest players from around the world, yes, but also any rando can put up the entry fee and register. I don’t follow the Super Smash Bros. competitive scene that closely, and I didn’t watch any of the tournament in 2013, but I’ll just guess that the top 128 players were probably all very strong. At Evo 2013, the round of 128 was when the quarterfinals began; everything before that was qualifying pools (and, at least in Street Fighter, which I’m more familiar with, there aren’t ever more than two pro-level players in the same Evo pool). I’ll go ahead and guess also that players 129-256 were good journeymen Smashers—non-pros who nevertheless understand high-level mechanics and would dominate the vast majority of people casually playing Super Smash Bros. at home. Below that, though, I’d guess that the skill levels vary widely. When I watch the Evo pools for Street Fighter IV and Marvel vs. Capcom 3, I always see at least a few people who clearly had no idea what they signed up for. Maybe Taylor Hicks got lucky and was matched up against toddlers, and that’s where his two wins came from. Of course, it’s also possible that he beat two really good players, and is himself really good, and he only lost because his pool was stacked. There’s no way to know for sure, so, while the luck of the draw is a factor, I'll maintain that, on average, going 2-2 at Evo is pretty good.

It’s also possible that, even if he was technically entered into the tournament, he never actually had to play anyone. Doubtless, some registrants failed to show up to their early-round matches and became byes for their scheduled opponents. Maybe Taylor Hicks’s two wins were actually two byes. Of course, it’s also possible that Taylor Hicks, a grown-ass man who was in Vegas for work, never actually lost to anyone, but rather himself became a bye when he had to leave the tournament early. Hick’s calendar for that weekend indicates he was performing during the first two days of Evo 2013, and was free on the last day (but, going by his placing, he would already have been knocked out of the tournament by that third day). (Bill Trinen, by the way, is scheduled to get a first-round bye, according to the not-yet-finalized Evo 2015 bracket, so he'd only have to beat one other player to match Hicks's alleged 2-2 record.)

If Taylor Hicks really did compete in Super Smash Bros. Melee at Evo 2013, he went 2-2 for 257th place. That’s a mere two rungs up from last place (out of 19 places). Still, I’d say two wins is pretty respectable. Unfortunately, other than the one photo, there’s no evidence that Taylor Hicks really competed at Evo 2013. To my knowledge, even Hicks himself hasn’t ever acknowledged these reports… until this recent tweet at Bill Trinen, which is the only reason I’m inclined to believe that he really did enter Evo 2013! If nothing else, it suggests that Hicks at least knows what Super Smash Bros. is, knows what Evo is, and cares enough to respond to a random tweet that did not specifically name either of those things and gave hardly any context besides (and, no, Taylor Hicks does not just respond to every tweet that mentions him).

I've dug and conjectured as far as I can, and I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions based on the evidence or lack thereof. Me, I'm going to believe that Taylor Hicks beat two people in Super Smash Bros. Melee at Evo 2013, finishing 2-2 and ahead of 316 other competitors. Again, for an amateur player, that's very respectable.

Still, he'll never be my Season 5 American Idol! Nor my preferred American Idol contestant-turned-Smash star! #McPheever

https://youtu.be/yQ0YzMGOIk8

The Music of the Deaf

When I was a student at UCSD in the early 2000’s, I took a linguistics course on "Sign Language and Its Culture." This was an introductory linguistics course, which I was taking only to fulfill a credit. I had no real expectations for the class, but the course title alone contained an idea new to me. For whatever reason, I had never before then even considered that there could be such a thing as a distinct culture of sign language.

I could only imagine how great a loss it would have felt to me personally, if ever I were to lose my own sense of hearing, and that would lead me to thinking how unfortunate it must be to be deaf. Unenlightened as I was, I pictured a hypothetical deaf person being basically like myself (an American male, let's say, with whom I might have many other things in common), only they would be "missing" that one sense, consequently rendering them an "incomplete" version of me. I never quite articulated it in those terms, but that was, if only subconsciously, nevertheless how I perceived things, even gifted as I was with my full five traditional senses.

In my ignorance, it never occurred to me that this attitude of mine was shallow, insensitive, perhaps even offensive. The professor of that class, David Perlmutter, didn't hold it against me, nor against, indeed, the majority of students, who simply didn't know any better. That was why he was here, after all—to educate us.

Perlmutter's most memorable lesson for us was an anecdote out of his conversations with the deaf community. Suppose there were a magic pill that could instantly make a deaf person able to hear. As Perlmutter recounted, when asked if they would take such a pill, one deaf individual, rather than answering, turned the question around and asked, "Would you, as a hearing person, ever take a pill that would make you deaf?" And he continued: "Or, as an American, would you ever take a pill that would make you French?"

Their position was clear enough: they did not regard their deafness as a condition in need of a cure, any more than being French could be considered an affliction. Being deaf did not make them less able, in most every way that counted. If there were certain things they could not do that some hearing people could, well, there are a great many things that I can't do that some hearing people can, or, for that matter, that some deaf people can—compose a symphony, for example, or compete in the Olympics. Deaf people are no less able to enjoy community or to produce culture and art. And if the culture particular to the deaf community ever seems unconventional to outsiders, is it any less the case that, say, French cuisine might seem strange and foreign to someone from Kansas?

Not everyone was entirely convinced by Perlmutter's lesson, as there was some audible scoffing coming from the back of the lecture hall. I should mention again that this was an introductory course; the material, easy and intended for general consumption, leaned toward politically correct feel-good answers over relentless challenging inquiry. Although I say I came out of that class more enlightened than I went in, and certainly more knowledgeable, still there were many fair questions raised and not answered.

Setting aside the magic pills, some saw a flaw in the reasoning put forward by that proud member of the deaf community. Was their culture truly "deaf culture"? Or was it rather, as even the title of the course suggested, "the culture of sign language"? If it was the latter, then the deaf person would indeed seem to be at a disadvantage. A determined hearing person could eventually become fluent in sign language, and thereby assimilate its culture, but a deaf person could never appreciate sounds in the same way that a hearing person could.

Professor Perlmutter himself seemed to be the case in point, a hearing person who was the resident expert on the culture of sign language. He had studied sign language, engaged with the deaf community, and developed an appreciation for their art. Perlmutter did take a step back to remind us that he was not deaf, and that he in no way fancied himself qualified to represent the deaf community. Still, he was the one here gushing to us about how beautiful was “the music of the deaf." What could he know of it, without being deaf himself? And if he, a hearing person, could appreciate it well enough to find it beautiful, didn't that only undermine the deaf person's position that there might be something to lose in becoming hearing?

For me personally, there was no concept in that class more difficult to grasp than this idea of “the music of the deaf.” Beyond mentioning that it existed and insisting that it was beautiful, Perlmutter did not oblige us with a demonstration or even a video. I suppose it was somewhat outside the scope of that linguistics course.

I thought of Beethoven, of course, although he was never mentioned in the class, and truthfully probably was not relevant to a course on the culture of sign language. Beethoven began to lose his hearing as an adult, only becoming mostly deaf toward the end of his life, after he was already an accomplished composer. He continued to produce brilliant works during that later period, but I don’t think this was the “music of the deaf” that Perlmutter was talking about. Beethoven knew what it was to hear music. I imagined he could still use his knowledge and memory as a reference for his later compositions. He would be able to “hear” a note in his mind, even if his ears no longer served.

I wondered, what was it like for someone who was born deaf? They might still be able to appreciate music, maybe even be able to compose. They could experience the vibrational variations of the sound, and perhaps they could process the math in their minds to produce… something unknowable to me. I did not think I could ever know what a deaf composer’s music “sounded” like to them, nor could they know what their compositions sounded like to me. (To be fair, I don’t think I could ever know what a hearing composer’s music really sounds like to them, either, only what it sounds like to me.)

But I think what Perlmutter was really talking about was song—not deaf composers writing “hearing people’s music,” but deaf musicians singing lyrics through sign language, perhaps unaccompanied by any sound at all, primarily for the appreciation of deaf audiences. This was a vastly more difficult concept for me to grasp, because, to me, music could not be separated from sound. You could sign the lyrics to a song, but, without the music, it was just words, poetry. Hearing people had poetry too, but a poem was not a song. I just didn’t get it.

A few weeks back, however, I was attending an OK Go concert (House of Blues San Diego, May 1, 2015), and I noticed there was a woman, not on the stage but next to it, who appeared to be interpreting the show into sign language. She was standing on a small platform off to the side, in front of a party of concertgoers, who, I observed, were conversing with one another through sign language. Transfixed, I watched her for a couple songs, and thought at last that I understood this “music of the deaf.”

https://youtu.be/vN2mduEBsPE

It’s not just signed lyrics, not just words; there’s a musicality to her every movement. You can contrast her performance of the song against the middle portion of the video, where she’s interpreting the band’s non-musical banter with the crowd. When she is interpreting speech, her signing is still expressive, of course, but there is not the same rhythm, not the "melody," that accompanies her interpretation of the music.

So, there we have it?

Honestly, I still have no idea. This was not an original deaf composition but an interpretation of a hearing song, so I don’t know if it counts as an example of deaf music. Also, I was fully capable of hearing the live band, so I was not appreciating the sign language performance on its own. I also don’t know if the interpreter herself was deaf, though I’m guessing not. She actually switched off every few songs with another lady, who I’m sure was hearing, because I saw her speaking with the venue staff. The woman in the video? I just can’t say for certain. In any case, I’m obviously not qualified to assess her fluency. I don’t even know if it matters.

Maybe I’m just not capable of appreciating deaf music. Maybe that’s something I’ll just have to resign myself to missing out on because I’m not deaf.

One final observation: the group that the interpreter was performing for was cheering and dancing and drinking, and overall seemed to enjoy the show just like any other concertgoers. In the middle of one song, however, two ladies started signing to one another, and it became a rather drawn-out conversation. It was clear that they were not paying attention to the performance, until finally another of their companions seemed to call them out for being rude. Seeing them conversing, I was actually a little envious, because I can’t usually even hear myself speak under the loudness of the music at these shows. Of course, I guess I’m not supposed to be talking anyway, because the whole point is to hear the music, not myself. It also made me think, maybe these distracted ladies just weren’t that into the performance. So maybe it wasn’t that great an example of deaf music.

Kitten – "Like a Stranger" / "I'll Be Your Girl" (Live at Amoeba Music)

Chloe Chaidez of the band Kitten performing a soul-baring two-song acoustic set at the Hollywood Amoeba:

https://youtu.be/ghW-mNWZk6Q

Kitten will be performing in San Diego this Friday, May 1, 2015, opening for OK Go at the House of Blues.

The Voyager (Jenny Lewis, 2014)

With her 2014 solo album, The Voyager, Jenny Lewis, formerly the frontwoman of the now disbanded Rilo Kiley, proves an artist to grow into midlife with. The Voyager is also my pick for album of the year and maybe the best work Lewis has ever done.

The breezy sound of the production barely masks the gloomier contemplations contained in Lewis’s lyrics throughout The Voyager. Catchy lead single “Just One of the Guys,” produced by Beck, came packaged with a gender-bending music video that was much shared across the blogosphere.

http://youtu.be/Irvcf6dCk-k

Starring Anne Hathaway, Kristen Stewart, and Brie Larson, the video’s images of the women portraying sleazily mustachioed caricatures of masculinity suggest a defiant satire of society’s expectations of women approaching a certain age. But, taking the track in the larger context of the album’s overall directness and introspectiveness, one wonders whether “Just One of the Guys” is truly ironic, mock serious, or rather something more honest and unpretentious after all, when Lewis sings, “When I look at myself, all I can see / I’m just another lady without a baby.”

It perhaps echoes the sentiments of “She’s Not Me,” wherein Lewis addresses a former lover, who has since moved on. The song’s title lyric would deny any envy on her part toward the woman who has taken her place, yet, as the story develops, it becomes quickly apparent that any lingering regret over the failed relationship is only the narrator’s own and not the former lover’s.

The song and the album relate to a generation of listeners who are just now seeing their friends and former lovers all at once moving on from them, getting married and having children. As Lewis lives with her choices, she does not submit to others’ standards, but neither is she immune to society’s glare, nor unaffected by her own observations of the joys filling others, as they live the lives she might have.

Lewis’s strength as a storyteller also shines on mid-album highlight “Late Bloomer,” a coming-of-age tale, wherein a restless teenage traveler meets a “big sister” character, with whom she falls into a passionate obsession resembling love. Yet, when the trip ends and they part ways, it is the narrator who fails to keep in touch. This ultimate lack of fulfillment speaks to the void of human existence—a persistent alienation, which we can only keep at bay through finite companionship (or resolve by starting families, so society would have us believe).

Even as Lewis looks back, she is finally resigned to the one-way momentum of life. While peers move forward with their lives, this is also, for many, the age at which one must begin to seriously confront the mortality of their parents’ generation, as Lewis did, when her father passed away during the period since her last album. Death and loss consequently figure into The Voyager’s existential themes, as we consider those departed to put into perspective where we ourselves are on this journey.

Thus does Lewis bookend her album with its most poignant tracks. Opener "Head Underwater" is a wrenching and incisive reflection on the lives she has led up to this point. Again, it balances an upbeat sound against lyrics that, on closer inspection, are quite dark and haunting. She is at a loss to discern from her own experiences where she was ever headed, but she is determined to march forward anyway. There is uncertainty but also wonder. Closing things on that note is the cosmic title track, "The Voyager," one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful songs of the year.

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Jenny Lewis will be playing in San Diego on Saturday, October 25, 2014 at the House of Blues.

I Never Learn (Lykke Li, 2014)

The official music video for "Gunshot," off Swedish singer-songwriter Lykke Li's superb 2014 LP, I Never Learn:

http://youtu.be/AIruwzhozTc

The last and best album in a trilogy that began with 2008's precocious Youth Novels (released when Li was 21) and continued on with 2011's ostentatious Wounded Rhymes, I Never Learn is an arresting contemplation on the sobering heartbreak that has effected the completed coming of age of the young woman and artist—an awakening that brings with it no emotional fulfillment but is her most musically mature work to date. Li has been described as a dream pop artist, including on some of her official promotional materials, but this album expresses as much the agonizing end of the dream as it does the longing to retreat from the now bitter world of wakefulness. The artist is revealing in this latest collection of songs without being vulnerable, as she wails achingly intense lyrics beneath heavy reverb and with an icy mystique. She owns now her misery with the same self-certainty with which she has always owned her passions and her craft.

Lykke Li will be playing in San Diego tomorrow night, Monday, September 22, 2014 at the North Park Theatre.

Bonds (Deluka, 2014)

I was first introduced to indie dance-rock band Deluka when I heard "Come Back to Me" (off their 2010 album, You Are The Night) beckoning to me over the Macy's in-store playlist. The evocative lyrics, along with Ellie Innocenti's captivating voice and distinct British accent, made for an irresistible imperative. Their earlier song, "Sleep Is Impossible," was also featured in the hit 2008 video game Grand Theft Auto IV, but it never came on the in-game radio during my admittedly brief time playing.

In the four years since You Are The Night, the originally-from-Birmingham Deluka relocated from Brooklyn to LA, where they assumed residencies at a few venues, and released a handful of songs directly to the Internet. They continue to work on their full-length followup to the impressive You Are The Night, but, in the meantime, they have put out a new five-track EP, Bonds.

Led by the single "Home," the record is an intriguing mix of traces of the disco-punk flavor of Deluka's earliest work, some evocative indie pop rock along the lines of "Come Back to Me," and even a tinge of heartland sound. And the music is carried all the way by the rich and bluesy singing of frontwoman Ellie Innocenti, which manages the rare combination of sounding both commanding and vulnerable.

http://youtu.be/cZ54Ue-HGcU

Deluka will be playing in San Diego this Tuesday, August 26, 2014, at Soda Bar.

Hello Memory (Little Daylight, 2014)

Brooklyn-based synthpop group Little Daylight’s 2014 debut LP, Hello Memory, is one of this summer’s highlights.

The trio of Nikki Taylor, Matt Lewkowicz, and Eric Zeiler formed Little Daylight two years ago, taking their name from the George MacDonald fairy tale, and started out remixing tracks by other electro-pop artists, including Passion Pit, St. Lucia, and Niki and the Dove. In 2013, they released their first EP, Tunnel Vision, an impressive and thoughtfully put-together collection of catchy tunes. Their talent for deconstruction and reconstruction as electronic remixers informed even their originals, including my favorite track off the EP, “Restart,” which, as the members tell it, began life as an accidentally reversed piece of another song they were writing. Tunnel Vision was also one of those albums that told a story. Taken in context, “Restart” is clearly the second of two parts, following “Treelines,” which is contemplative, anticipating the driving action of “Restart,” which, in my opinion, would be a great soundtrack to accompany, say, the climactic stage of a racing video game. And the closing track on Tunnel Vision, “Name in Lights,” would be a great cooldown song to accompany a victory lap or end credits sequence.

The band’s self-produced LP, Hello Memory, continues to show off the trio’s strengths. Together with lead single “Overdose,” the only song that reappears from Tunnel Vision, the nine new tracks on the album are synthpop distilled, powered by end-to-end hooks, relatable lyrics, and Taylor’s enchanting vocals. And, like Tunnel Vision, though this time twice as full, it contains a narrative arc. All its tracks are individually catchy, but, taken as whole, Hello Memory is a coming-of-age chronicle. Even as it maintains a consistent sound and upbeat attitude throughout, it somehow manages to capture the highs and lows of summer, opening with the idealistic “My Life,” which could serve as a prologue. The middle of the album features romantic throwbacks “Love Stories and “Mona Lisa,” before things slow down with the wistful and dreamy “Be Long.” A standout toward the end is the more mature but still optimistic “No One Else But You,” featuring more of a rock sound along with a guest appearance by Atlas Genius. When it’s all over, you can loop back again to “My Life,” which, on a second listen, takes on the character of a reflective framing device for the rest of the album.

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Little Daylight will be playing in San Diego this Tuesday night, August 19, 2014, in the Voodoo Room at the House of Blues.

Rdio vs. Spotify (For Cheapskates)

To the extent that I am not actually a paying subscriber to any of these services, I also do not count myself a true user of any of them. As someone who enjoys music and likes to keep up with new releases, however, but doesn’t generally need or want a soundtrack to accompany my entire daily life, I used to turn to Spotify as my free (ad-supported) on-demand streaming service of choice. Really, for cheapskates like me, there have only ever been two options: Spotify or Rdio. I used Spotify because its free version was more transparent; Rdio had an unspecified limit on how much you could listen to without paying. But, since Rdio removed all caps for web-based streaming at the beginning of this year, I decided to give it a try. It wasn’t like I was invested in Spotify in any literal sense, after all.

Truthfully, unless you’re a tech junkie, there is not a whole lot to distinguish Rdio from Spotify or from any of the other major competitors (Beats Music, Google Play Music All Access, Rhapsody etc.), such that anyone should feel strong personal attachments to one over all the others (well, unless you literally have a personal connection to the company). They all offer similarly large and overlapping catalogs, including most of the current releases that the average user would be looking for. Spotify has a slight edge overall in song selection, with such notable exclusives as Led Zeppelin and Metallica.

In addition to expansive on-demand catalogs, music discovery is another pillar of any streaming service experience. In fact, Beats Music’s entire competitive strategy is based around its playlists curated by actual human tastemakers—the sole premium it can offer over its more established competitors. Since Beats has no free version, I haven’t been able to put its curators to the test, but I’m skeptical. I’ve tried other services, including Slacker and Songza, which boasted “expert-programmed stations” or a “music concierge," and I felt they were way off the mark, so I have zero confidence in any such concepts.

Rdio and Spotify are both more barebones in this regard. They both let you browse new releases and top charts, and they will both make recommendations based on the music you’ve been listening to, with Spotify being considerably more aggressive in bringing things to your attention via its cluttered interface.

They also both include a bit of social networking, so you can see what’s hot among people you’re following. Spotify is the platform most likely to be used by a number of your Facebook friends, so if you use your own Facebook account to log in, you’ll see a lot of your friends on Spotify, along with what they’ve been listening to. I don’t find this to be a useful feature at all, because my Facebook friend list includes a broad spectrum of acquaintances with tastes far from my own.

Rdio can also integrate with Facebook, but the San Francisco-based service has cultivated a more techie-hipsterish following, so you’re less likely to run into your older or more conservative Facebook friends on Rdio. On the other hand, one of the freakier experiences for me personally was when I randomly came across, not a Facebook friend at all, but a former college classmate from one of my short fiction workshops of almost a decade ago.

Rdio had notified me of a new release I might be interested in, and I clicked on the link to check it out. I found that it had only been played a dozen times at that point. (This public data is actually pretty interesting. I never would have guessed how few plays some of the artists I listen to get.) Rdio further tracks the recent activity for an album, displaying the most recent listeners. And there among them I saw, to my horror, the name of this old classmate I hadn't even thought of in years, who was shown as having listened only “a moment ago.” Terrified at even the remotest possibility that I might have to reconnect with this person, I naturally freaked out, got the hell off that page, and shut everything down. (One knock against Rdio: there’s no way to clean out your public listening history, except to make your entire account private.)

One of the neater things about Rdio is that some of the artists have accounts, and you can follow them just as you would any other user. Spotify’s “verified artist accounts” are ostensibly the same idea, but, on Rdio, some of these artists actually use their accounts to listen to music themselves, so you can see, not just some promotional playlist that they were paid to put together, but what they might be actively listening to on their own. Rdio is not as bustling with artist activity as Soundcloud or, for that matter, YouTube, but some of the semi-active artist accounts I’ve found include MNDR, Little Boots, and Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino. Sometimes you might even, by complete coincidence, find yourself listening to the same album at the same time as Greta Morgan of Gold Motel and The Hush Sound.



That cool moment notwithstanding, I pretty quickly found that I didn’t much care what anybody else was listening to, be they friends, hip strangers, or any of the artists I myself listened to. So Rdio is not any more useful to me in this regard than any other service.

Both Rdio and Spotify also offer Pandora-style automated radio stations, which are theoretically supposed to aid both with discovering new music and with relieving you from the tyranny of choice, when you simply can’t decide what to play out of your massive library. For non-paying users, these stations are the only way to experience Rdio or Spotify on your mobile device.

In my experience, Rdio’s stations lag way behind just about every other service I’ve tried. As on Pandora, you pick an artist, song, or genre, and then Rdio will queue up songs from “similar” artists. To help Rdio get a better sense of your tastes, you can “thumbs up” tracks you like, as they play on the station. For me, after I gave my thumbs up to about 10-20 tracks (and thumbs down to a few others), Rdio started to play almost nothing but those same 10-20 tracks, even after I tuned the slider toward more adventurous, and even after I tried switching to a different station (albeit a similar one, as per my tastes). It wouldn’t even give me different tracks by the same artists. Sure, I enjoy “No Rest for the Wicked” by Lykke Li. I mean, that’s why I gave it a thumbs up. But I don’t need it on a constant rotation. It’s not even my favorite song off that album!

I think this may actually be a bug. Or maybe Rdio’s stations are so shoddy right now because it is transitioning to a different algorithm, after Spotify bought The Echo Nest, which formerly powered Rdio’s music discovery engine. In any case, this doesn’t affect me too much, because I would only use my phone for music if I were away from my computer (e.g. when I’m on the road or when I’m working out), in which case I usually prefer to listen to podcasts or talk radio anyway. (The new NPR One app, by the way, gets a thumbs up from me after a solid week of use.) Meanwhile, when I’m on the computer using the web version of Rdio, I always know what I want to listen to. So I have little need of the stations.

Going back to the social networking aspects, I will say that one unique feature that Rdio offers is the ability to play other users’ personal stations, which includes stations molded by the actual listening habits of those artists mentioned previously as having legitimate Rdio accounts. I haven’t really tried this much myself, because, again, I’m not all that interested in what other users are listening to. But I suppose it could potentially be a fun and social way to discover music.

So, after all that, how is it that Rdio has managed to win me over? Well, as I said from the outset, there’s not a whole lot to practically differentiate Rdio and Spotify, which means it all comes down to the little things.

I find Rdio’s web player to be faster-loading, its white color scheme much less oppressive than Spotify’s black, and its overall design much slicker and more streamlined. Ditto for the mobile apps, although the mobile experience is quite limited in either case, unless you pay for a subscription. But, ultimately, my preference for Rdio has less to do with its own virtues than with my frustrations with Spotify.

A recent major update to Spotify effectively retired its long-established “star” system. Before, if you liked a track, you could click the star button, which would add it to your “Starred” playlist, which, for a lot of users, was functionally their “collection” or “library.” Now, the star button has been replaced by a plus button, which, when clicked, becomes a check mark, which, when clicked again, becomes an X. This is already confusing and unintuitive, especially as the change initially arrived without any helpful tutorial to explain what all these newfangled symbols meant precisely. Moreover, what became of all those tracks users had previously starred? Well, they’re still part of the “Starred” playlist, and users are free to continue to add new songs to that playlist. But there’s no longer an easy one-click button dedicated to this purpose. The “Starred” playlist is now just like any regular playlist, and you have to dig into the menus to add songs to it. Instead of starring tracks you like, Spotify now prefers that you add them to your collection by clicking the plus button.

As someone who has never bothered curating playlists, and just wants one unified library of all the songs I’ve ever liked, I found that Spotify’s new system served only to introduce needless fragmentation and redundancy. I had my old list of starred songs, which Spotify moved around and made harder to find, and now I was also adding new songs via the plus button to my collection, which had previously been empty (because it used to be easier to star tracks than to add them—the reverse of how things are now). I haven’t even discussed Spotify’s radio stations yet. When you give the thumbs up to a track on a station, Spotify will automatically add that song, not to your collection, but to your “Liked from Radio” playlist, creating yet another layer of redundancy.

At least the stations themselves are much better, in my experience, on Spotify than on Rdio—not so repetitive, and occasionally able to introduce me to new music. In fact, for the price (i.e. free), Spotify might offer the most robust experience on mobile, because, besides just playing music by "similar" artists, it allows non-subscribers to shuffle only a specified artist's discography. So, even if you can't pick a specific song to play on demand on mobile, you can still be assured of hearing a bunch of other songs by that same artist, and probably eventually that one song too, after a bit of shuffling. You can even shuffle your own playlists, if music discovery's not really your thing, and you just want to hear your jams on your phone. Again, I don't really use my phone for music, so none of this means anything to me.

I never even really listened to my “Starred” playlist on shuffle (or otherwise). But, at the end of the day, Spotify's inscrutable trend from already cumbersome to downright arcane is aggravating on principle. And so I've had it with Spotify.

Also, Rdio has Chromecast support.

Uh Huh Her - Future Souls Tour (Belly Up Tavern, June 19, 2014)

I did not know that Leisha Hailey, bassist for the electropop duo Uh Huh Her, was also an actress, apparently best known as one of the stars of Showtime's The L Word (2004 - 2009). I did not know that Hailey was, in real life, an out lesbian, who had dated none other than k.d. lang herself for a number of years. I did not realize that Camila Grey, lead vocalist and guitarist of Uh Huh Her, was also openly gay, and had, in fact, been romantically linked to Hailey. I had not heard the story of their having been kicked off a Southwest flight, allegedly for arguing with a flight attendant over their public display of affection ("Leisha Hailey escorted off Southwest jet after kissing girlfriend." Los Angeles Times, September 26, 2011). I honestly had no idea that Hailey and Grey were lesbian icons of any sort. But that became very clear very quickly, as I went to see Uh Huh Her perform at the Belly Up in Solana Beach, CA, where the crowd was 95 percent female, mostly girls each with an arm around another girl. And, in case that wasn't clue enough (and I never jump to conclusions!), I overheard the girl next to me say to her companion, "They're such lesbian icons, y'know?" Well, now I know.

Prior to seeing them perform live, all I knew about Uh Huh Her was that I really dug their debut album, Common Reaction (2008), at its best resembling the progeny of Depeche Mode and Garbage—channeling the new wave in its synths, and with grittier vocals and an all-around darker, moodier, subtly more menacing sound than many contemporary electropop acts. With their recent third LP, Future Souls (2014), they went entirely electronic. While the album has overall more of a dance sound, its best tracks ("Innocence," "Bullet," "Fine Lines White Lies") retain the soulful swells, intimate harmonies, and haunting edge of Common Reaction, along with more polished and sophisticated production that lends the synth a cinematic flavor.

The quality of the songwriting also came to the fore during the live show, where, in contrast to the arrangements on the Future Souls album, Hailey and Grey stuck to their bass and guitar almost throughout, only switching to their keyboards on a few select songs or parts of songs. With just a lone drummer added to back them up, the sound was more minimalist than on the album, yet surprisingly it had the feel of a hard rock show. Missing a large portion of the synth component, Uh Huh Her live did not sound very much like they do on the albums, yet the melodies and lyrics carried through intact and continued to stand out, while Camila Grey's raw guitar solos were impressively legit.

Little Daylight - "Mona Lisa" (Live X-Session)

From a 91X "X-Session," rising Brooklyn-based group Little Daylight performs a sweet acoustic version of one of their earliest compositions, "Mona Lisa":

http://youtu.be/RbjodrPR3h0

And, off their forthcoming debut LP, Hello Memory, here's the studio version of "Mona Lisa," a fun synthpop track blending both live instruments and electronic elements, along with alluring vocals and infectious hooks and choruses:

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Little Daylight's Hello Memory is due out July 15. You can pre-order it on iTunes.

The Sounds with Blondfire and Strange Talk - House of Blues San Diego, March 25, 2014

The Sounds' 2014 North American tour hit San Diego last week at the House of Blues, and they were joined by Blondfire and Strange Talk.

I arrived to the show just in time to catch Australian synthpop band Strange Talk performing "Cast Away," the only song of theirs that I actually know. It's an infectious neon number that has been featured on some TV shows and in the video game Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2012). Their other songs were decent, but many just sounded like less inspired, overly samey variations on their best track—nothing that had me especially eager to check out their album (Cast Away, due for release in the U.S. on April 20). Still, for being the warm-up to the warm-up, they performed well above par. At times, they had three keyboards going at the same time.

Strange Talk was followed by Blondfire. While synth is a substantial part of Blondfire's sound as well, they built upon Strange Talk's opening act by bringing much more power and live energy to the evening. I had seen them open for The Mowgli's just a few months earlier, and I had thought that they were good, but, having since had more time to familiarize myself with their recently released album, Young Heart, I was better able to enjoy their performance this time around. Once again, they only played songs off Young Heart (so no "L-L-Love"), and I was disappointed that they didn't play one of my favorites off the album, "Kites." On the other hand, "Right Gone Wrong," the song I had considered the most boring on the album, was more impressive live, particularly when vocalist Erica Driscoll reached for the bigger notes toward the end. Music aside, Driscoll and the band seemed, as last time, fairly low-key, content to play supporting parts for the night.

After Blondfire finished up, the bassist from Strange Talk returned to the main stage, wheeling out a mixer, to play DJ during the intermission before The Sounds' set.

When The Sounds finally took the stage, I almost didn't even recognize lead singer Maja Ivarsson. Dressed in a leather jacket and with her hair tied back and a dirtier shade of blonde than in the poster above, she looked nearly like a normal person, but for the combination of stiletto heels and obscenely high-cut hot pants.

It was quite the contrast, having The Sounds come out after Blondfire, both of them cheery bands fronted by blonde female vocalists. Although I had thought Blondfire had rocked it with their set, the difference in the level of performance, once The Sounds came out, was night and day. To a degree, The Sounds' performance could have been described as businesslike, since the band wasn't all that chatty between songs, and I never got the sense that I was seeing them doing anything they hadn't done the same way hundreds of times before. But Maja exudes such incomparable charisma in her vocals alone—fresh, forceful, clean yet with a somewhat abrasive edge, absolutely spellbinding—and the amount of breath she must have to have been able to sustain that level of all-out singing through the night (plus another twenty-five on this tour) is astounding.

They played quite a number of songs (more than I could keep count of), their set drawing broadly across a catalog that has so far spanned five albums and more than a decade of stellar indie rock. Deep enough is their catalog, in fact, that they probably could have played a completely different set comprising none of the same songs performed that night, and it could have been just as excellent. Maybe the closest they have to signature songs are the brash inverted anthem "Living in America," off their debut album (2002) of the same title, and the catchy "Something to Die For," the title track to The Sounds' more synth-based fourth album (2011) and also featured on the soundtrack to Scream 4. They played both songs that night, as well as other such popular favorites as "Painted By Numbers," "Song With a Mission," and "Rock 'n' Roll." They did not, however, play my personal favorite, "Hurt You" (AKA "the song from that one Geico cavemen commercial") from their second album, Dying to Say This to You (2006). I didn't really expect them to, since it's a bit of an unusual song for them—more of a club track, where Maja splits singing duties with guitarist Felix Rodriquez, and the vocals overall take a backseat to the electric instruments—which probably would not have been the most suitable for a live show. (Although they did perform a lively rendition of the similarly structured "Tony the Beat"....) For me, the highlights of the night were instead "The Best of Me," featuring Maja's most epic vocal performance off Something to Die For, and "No One Sleeps When I'm Awake," with its addictive opening guitar solo to intro their third album, Crossing the Rubicon (2009).

To my recollection, they only played maybe half the tracks off their most recent album, last year's Weekend, spread across the night. My first impression of Weekend was that it was disappointingly their weakest album to date, and so I was glad not to have it dominate their live show. The only immediately compelling song on the album was "Shake Shake Shake," which, no matter how catchy it might have been, was clearly ill-conceived, being unfortunately and unavoidably associated, on account of its title and key lyric, with the KC and the Sunshine Band song. "Too Young to Die," the designated poignant song, in the tradition of "Midnight Sun" and "The Best of Me," was about as sappy as "The Best of Me," but it lacked the great hooks and just never seemed to build to anything. "Hurt the Ones I Love" was an even cheesier and clunkier variation on the same theme. "Weekend," the ballad, had the double misfortune of suffering from an already-tired-to-begin-with lyric that was then further exhausted through excessive repetition as the chorus. Or was "Weekend" actually the epic, and "Hurt the Ones I Love" the ballad? It was hard to tell, because in neither case was the band succeeding at whatever it was going for.

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(You can listen to the rest of the album on SoundCloud here.)

My opinion that Weekend is The Sounds' weakest album remains unchanged, but hearing some of the songs performed live and in that greater context of an overview of the band's collective history has given me a newfound appreciation for them. It's an uneven album, lacking in instantly accessible winners, compared to their more refined previous two albums. In some ways, it's more of a back-to-basics record, with songs that seem composed specifically with live crowds in mind, in contrast with the more electronic, dance-oriented Something to Die For.

They opened the show with the fun and playful "Emperor," which, after a few listens, emerged as my definite favorite track on Weekend. Maja sings this one together with guitarist Felix Rodriguez, whose distinctly high-pitched and endearingly accented English is really what makes the song. "Take It The Wrong Way" is another really good one, showcasing Maja's vocals in fine sassy form, alongside the most compelling guitar work on the album. "Outlaw" is not one of the band's better tracks, but it evokes the more punk sound of their earliest successes. Meanwhile, "Panic," which they did not perform live, carries on the dance vibe they had going in Something to Die For. And the acoustic "Great Day," the most surprising track on the album—almost The Sounds' take on country—perhaps best exemplifies the easy mirth that characterizes Weekend, overall less fiercely determined, for better or worse, than their previous albums.

Young Heart (Blondfire, 2014)

Blondfire's second LP, its first in six years, Young Heart offers seven tracks' worth of new material. After a blithe opening number in the laid-back "Young Heart," the album is front-loaded with the entirety of last year's four-track Where the Kids Are EP, while track 10, the serenely stirring "Life of the Party," previously appeared on the soundtrack for Dallas Buyers Club (2013). I thought the Where the Kids Are EP was excellent, and, although the amount of recycled content on Young Heart may be a tad disappointing to any fans who have already exhausted the old songs, what new stuff the LP adds is very much appreciated. And, for anyone not yet acquainted with Blondfire's offerings over the last two years, Young Heart is a substantial and thoroughly enjoyable indie pop record well worthy of a listen.

The combination of Erica Driscoll's voice, tender if almost too mellow, together with brother Bruce Driscoll's slick production, creates Blondfire's ethereal yet propulsive sound, while catchy melodies and buoyant lyrics arrest listeners into a daydream that is reflective in an uplifting way—the perfect soundtrack to lighten one's mood through an overlong summer. In the fresher middle section of the album, the synth is markedly less bombastic than on Where the Kids Are. The pulsing bassline of "Dear In Your Headlights" and the surging guitarwork in "Kites," along with Erica Driscoll's most spirited vocal performances on the album, make for irresistibly sunny jams that you can legitimately bob your head to. "We Are One" is another highlight, a more downtempo yet rousing anthem. The other tracks too are pleasant, with the sweetly understated "The Only Ones" closing things on the perfect note.

http://youtu.be/mBhufl-wIRM

Blondfire will be playing in San Diego again this Tuesday night, March 25, 2014, at the House of Blues, opening for Swedish indie rock band The Sounds during their North American tour.

Frozen (Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee, 2013)

Frozen isn't quite up there with the magic of Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Aladdin (1992)—we're not yet back to the days of a single Disney movie meriting multiple "Best Original Song" Academy Award nominations—but it is by far Disney's best animated musical since its Renaissance, and Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez's "Let It Go," performed by Idina Menzel, should be a deserved lock for the Oscar. The film may be loosely based on Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tale The Snow Queen (1845), which Disney had been trying to adapt for decades, but Frozen feels almost a project that grew out from around this one song as much as the song itself was composed specifically with Idina Menzel's vocal range and performance ability in mind. As Menzel belts out lyrics like "I don't care what they're going to say" and "Here I stand in the light of day," the soaring anthem to proud, even defiant self-affirmation is an instant classic, yet one keenly conscious of today's audiences and concerns, and it sounds destined to conquer Broadway.

http://youtu.be/moSFlvxnbgk

Frozen's other theme song, "For the First Time in Forever," is rather generic—derivative of, but inferior to, past wide-eyed classics, such as "Part of Your World" (The Little Mermaid, 1989) and "A Whole New World" (Aladdin, 1992). Nevertheless, it's instantly hummable, and Kristen Bell, most often associated with a more ironic acting style and off-screen personality, sings impressively and with surprising warmth. The reprise, actually sung in counterpoint with Menzel joining Bell, is another high point in the soundtrack and in the film. Meanwhile, the comedic number "In Summer" features in probably the best musical sequence in the movie—a hilariously absurd and dynamic cartoon daydream. "Fixer Upper" has some irritatingly infectious verses, though I felt it was oddly situated—a lighthearted group number sung by the movie's most underdeveloped characters right as the story rounds its final turn toward the more serious—and probably should have been left as an outtake. The remaining songs are more forgettable and unlikely to achieve any kind of longevity beyond the immediate context of the film.

Songs aside, Frozen confidently points toward a return to Disney's glory days with massive box office, renewed cultural relevance, and a story that is grand, enchanting, and fun. For a good decade there, following 1999's Tarzan, Disney actually seemed tentative about trying to live up to its own animated epics, and so it entered into a phase marked by lighter and/or more experimental fare that, although generally well-received, never captivated imaginations on the same scale as it had during its '90s heyday. 2009's The Princess and the Frog, Disney's first calculated effort to reclaim its animation throne with another princess musical, was a good movie, but commercially it lagged behind CG productions from Pixar, Dreamworks, Fox, and even Sony. They took another stab at it with 2010's Tangled, which performed much better while also coming across more conservative, less ambitious—a charming but slight film.

Like Tangled, Frozen is another CG princess musical, but it is better in every way. The cast of characters is much stronger, the story is more engrossing, and it possesses far more distinct a visual identity among the glut of CG-animated pictures in theaters these days. Where the animation stands relative to the hand-drawn films of the past is difficult to quantify. The different techniques inform different stylistic choices which, in turn, produce different effects on the viewer. The great images of the traditionally animated classics, such as Sleeping Beauty (1959), as well as of mixed works like Beauty and the Beast, affect and arrest one in the manner of a remarkable painting. Frozen, which commits itself to a fully three-dimensional look (as opposed to using computer animation in service of a still 2-D look, a la Beauty and the Beast), is maybe more comparable to sculpture, although, much more so than modeling the characters, most of the artistry here seems invested toward the production design—in this case, the splendid castles and majestic winter landscape—and the viewer appreciates it accordingly more for its spaces than its images. I do find it less opulent and less striking than Disney's traditionally animated films of the '90s (and also more minimalist than contemporary Pixar films), which is the main reason why I still can't regard the film as a whole as on that same magical level. The "Let It Go" sequence, for instance, I found to be disappointingly sparse and, ironically, flat, compared to any of the signature sequences from the Renaissance era, or even compared to The Princess and the Frog. That is not to say, however, that Frozen is without great images of its own. The climactic shot of the two sisters is truly gorgeous—framing, poses, costuming, use of color—it's just masterfully done.

Frozen's weakest aspect is its story, which is on the conventional side, even though at times it seems to promise more. The character of Elsa, based on the originally villainous Snow Queen from the Hans Christian Anderson tale, is potentially one of the more compelling heroines in Disney's canon. She gets the best song, obviously, and her ice powers also make her, no pun intended, much cooler than her sister, Anna (or pretty much any Disney princess ever). If you were to poll a bunch of young children—girls AND boys—you would find that Elsa is by far the most popular character in the movie—the one whose toy the kids want. So it's disappointing that, for long stretches of the story, she's consigned to play the classic damsel role, a la Snow White or Princess Aurora—maybe not always in distress, but nevertheless presumably literally waiting around off-camera and doing nothing while less interesting characters journey to meet her.

If it's not quite in that highest echelon alongside the likes of Beauty and the Beast, Frozen is nevertheless Disney's best animated feature in over a decade—a movie that, at the very least, reminds viewers of the studio's great epics, and both restores confidence and whets the appetite for Disney's next animated musical.

"Edge of the Ocean" (Ivy, Long Distance, 2001)

"Edge of the Ocean," Ivy's signature track off its third album, Long Distance (2001):

http://youtu.be/Zkd4vGZuXc0

I remember hearing this song a lot back in the day (well, actually, not even that long ago....). For a good couple of years, it was featured in many commercials, films, and television shows, including a 2001 episode of Roswell, where the band itself appeared on the show to perform the song. From the information available on Wikipedia, it seems the last notable use of it was during the end credits to the film Music and Lyrics (2007), which Ivy band member Adam Schlesinger did the music for.

Fast forward to 2014, and Ivy is a largely forgotten act. When I went to see Blondfire perform last December, my brother mentioned he had seen them open for Ivy some eight years or so ago, and I was like "Ivy? Who?"

Schlesinger, of course, remains an active and successful songwriter in film and television. The other two band members, Dominique Durand and Andy Chase, are married with children. The trio reunited after a six-year hiatus to release another album, All Hours, in 2011, after which Ivy quickly dropped off the map once more.

I tried looking on YouTube to see if there were any noteworthy live recordings of "Edge of the Ocean," but there's barely any video of the band at all. One fan channel, Ivy Fan Page, is virtually the only source for Ivy-related videos on YouTube (like the one above), including one circa-2002 acoustic performance of "Edge of the Ocean" and a lo-fi recording of the official music video for the Duotone remix of the song.

Anyway, the song and band came up on my radar again because I've been watching Veronica Mars (in preparation for the upcoming film), which features "Edge of the Ocean" on not one, but two separate episodes (Season 1, Episode 3 "Meet John Smith" and Season 2, Episode 10 "One Angry Veronica"), in addition to a couple other Ivy songs on other episodes.

Eventually Veronica Mars will be forgotten as well, but it's interesting how, in this Netflix era (though Veronica Mars specifically isn't on Netflix, so not the best example) of people binge-watching roughly decade-old shows for the first time, a strictly of-its-day hit like "Edge of the Ocean" can get a limited extension on its life from having been featured on a cult TV series.

Then again, according to TuneFind, "Edge of the Ocean" was used again as recently as 2011, on the short-lived ABC Family show The Nine Lives of Chloe King, so maybe the song yet has life in it!

The Mowgli's, Blondfire - The Griffin, December 12, 2013

I caught The Mowgli's when their "Random Acts of Kindness Tour" made its way to San Diego at The Griffin last Thursday, December 12, 2013. Opening for them on this tour was Blondfire, which was the band I was primarily going to see.

I quite enjoyed Blondfire's 2012 EP, Where the Kids Are, whose title track was featured in a Honda Civic TV ad earlier this year. Fronted by Erica Driscoll (who formed Blondfire together with her brother Bruce, who unfortunately no longer tours), their propulsive sound resembles a dreamier take on The Cardigans, or perhaps Metric with more sweetness.

It occurred to me too late, but it's not a sound, infectious as it is, that lends itself especially well to live performance. Many of Blondfire's catchier songs are made so by the synth elements, which, at this show, were just recorded tracks, nullifying much of the "live" element. And the songs are not especially on the lively side to begin with, so, although Driscoll and the band performed decently, the performance was just not energizing but almost rather the opposite. The stream of like-sounding songs started to have a tranquilizing effect on me, and I was only roused when Driscoll announced that she was going to play one of her favorites, which turned out not even to be a Blondfire song but a cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams."

I would have rather she had dug out their own best-known (and simply best) song from the band's earlier days, "L-L-Love," which was apparently featured in the movies Monster-in-Law (2005), Mozart and the Whale (2005), and, um, Bangkok Dangerous (2008). But she didn't play any of their older songs or even really make reference to Blondfire's history (like, back when they used to go by Astaire), other than to mention that their new album has been a long time in the making. Blondfire basically just showed up, gave a mostly unassuming performance, and then left the stage for The Mowgli's. Maybe, since they weren't the headliners, they didn't feel the need to put their best into their set and performance. At any rate, I still like Blondfire's music and am looking forward to their album.

The slightly disappointing performance from Blondfire did mean I needed The Mowgli's to be a lot better than I anticipated. Originally, I expected The Mowgli's would just be a bonus, as I did enjoy their one hit song, "San Francisco." Now, I was suddenly depending on them to be amazing, in order to justify the above-average price I had paid for my ticket. Fortunately, The Mowgli's did put on a great show, even if I couldn't recall any of their other songs once it was over.

The Mowgli's are an eight-piece band, which meant that small Griffin stage got pretty crowded. For such a large ensemble, their sound is not notably huge or intricate. Rather than yielding anything artistically or technically virtuous, the band's lineup more just supports its inclusive image as some love-loving peacenik collective. I don't know if it's really all that calculated, but I'm personally suspicious of any characters who would get up on a stage, as part of some "Random Acts of Kindness Tour," and dispense fuzzy messages about spreading love and making the world a better place.

Midway into The Mowgli's set, a giant drunk forced his way through the crowd to the front row, placing himself between two girls who were together but were thereafter separated for the rest of the night. As he gestured vigorously toward the stage with finger pistols, swimming motions, and flipping the bird, I wondered whether anyone would step up to try to deal with this jackass, but people's fear seemed to overtake their disapproval. I could see it in their eyes that the band members too had observed how boorish this guy was, but, not wanting to escalate a potentially volatile situation, they just tried to play it off as people having a wild good time, complimenting the guy's energy. Thus encouraged, the guy then pressed onward to rub the belly of one of the male vocalists who had gotten too close to the edge of the stage.

I thought to myself, this would be a moment of truth for these professed love-lovers. Would they recoil in disgust, or could they really be as cool yet warm as the words they put forth? The belly-rub had taken the musician by surprise; I perceived him hesitating that split-second while deciding how to react. Once he gathered himself, however, he did so with a smile and a high-five to the crazy guy. The hesitation told me one thing, but, ultimately, the smile and high-five told me more. Calculated or not, they were committed to this image, and able to put it ahead of any reflexive disgust. That was enough to impress me. After all, I consider "good" more a matter of effort than of nature.

Thereafter, the crazy guy would continue to grab at any band member who got within striking distance, even gripping the wrist of that same vocalist, who was, at that very moment, trying to play the guitar. Again, I could perceive some perturbation in the musician's brow, but he played on and then afterward gave the crazy guy another slap of affection. I honestly believe this crazy guy would have, given the chance, tried the same on the female band member or on Blondfire's Erica Driscoll, and I bet things would have gone a lot uglier in those cases, but luckily they never opened themselves up to that.

The Mowgli's played several songs. I don't know how many or which ones, but it was a very crowd-pleasing set. I find that The Mowgli's, quite the opposite of Blondfire, is an act that only "makes sense" live. I had listened to their album, Waiting for the Dawn (2013), before, and, other than "San Francisco," none of the songs really appealed to me. They were inoffensive but unremarkable. It's different when you see them perform those same songs live, however, because I think a lot of the act's personality isn't actually contained in the music but resides in the group of characters literally jumping around on stage.

It reminds me of when I was in my college writing workshops, and peers would sometimes read my work and question my language or even just claim not to "get it." When I would read aloud in my own voice, however, suddenly it would click and the feedback would be much more positive. Ultimately, it was a failure on my part, if my words couldn't hold up apart from my voice, because, after all, it was my ambition to be a writer, not a spoken-word artist. If I was ever to produce writing to be read on a wider scale, it would have to be with the understanding that I wouldn't be able to personally defend and clarify my work to every single reader.

Similarly, I don't think The Mowgli's music really holds up apart from the live performance—they're just kind of generic and forgettable songs—but, in the right circumstances (i.e. live), they can shine. When the band is hopping and dancing, and punctuating songs with warm words, and some are coming down from the stage to embrace the crowd, or other times inviting audience members (yes, the crazy guy) to join the band on the stage, that's when everything clicks and The Mowgli's seem like the greatest band in the world.

I would question, however, their decision to use "San Francisco" as their show-closer. It's typical, yes, to save your best-known song for last, building anticipation for it through the night. But "San Francisco" is clearly written to be an opener, as it is on Waiting for the Dawn. It announces the band and sets the mood. And The Mowgli's really don't have any other comparably energetic song that can so immediately pump up the crowd. It's just a waste to leave it until the end.

"Waves" (Blondfire, 2012)

The official music video for "Waves" by Blondfire, currently available on their 2012 EP, Where the Kids Are:

http://youtu.be/eNpqsJM-JLw

They're scheduled to play at The Griffin in San Diego this Thursday night, December 12, 2013, opening for The Mowgli's ("San Francisco").

"Drive Darling" (BOY, Mutual Friends, 2011)

The official music video for "Drive Darling" by BOY, from their 2011 debut album, Mutual Friends:

http://youtu.be/FUg7PSuC3ZU

They'll be playing in San Diego tonight, Sunday, October 27, 2013, at Porter's Pub at UCSD.

HAIM - The Casbah, October 15, 2013

HAIM played at the Casbah in San Diego last Tuesday. It was possibly the hottest ticket I've ever attended. I mean, the Casbah is a small venue with crap acoustics; everything just sounds like noise, and visibility is poor past the first two standing rows. But the show sold out within a week of the tickets going on sale. I got mine the first day they were available online, about two months before the show and before the release of HAIM's debut album, Days Are Gone. Then I checked the site about a week later, and they were all gone. For all I know, the tickets might have sold out even earlier than that. The point is, I don't see a lot of shows selling out that quickly. On the day of, as I got in line for doors opening, there were also about a half dozen people bumming around, hoping to buy tickets off any attendees who might have had extras. Clearly, a lot of people wanted in to this show. I too got caught up in the hype, hence why I pulled the trigger on that $18 ticket purchase so quickly, although, funnily enough, even all the way up until the release of Days Are Gone, I wouldn't really have called myself a fan.

Sometimes, as a way of discovering new music, I'll go on Twitter, look up artists I'm into, and then check what artists they follow. I figure those with talent should also have taste, which is probably a false assumption, as rarely ever has this yielded positive results. Many months ago, when I tried this, one act that stuck out was HAIM, whose following on Twitter seemed to include just about every artist I liked (along with a whole bunch of other young LA-area celebs). I looked them up, and I found that all they had put out up to that point was a 3-track EP.

I wasn't immediately impressed by any of the songs, and I wondered what the big deal was. I guessed that these three sisters—Este, Danielle, and Alana Haim—must have been industry nobility of some sort. Their Wikipedia entry is a little hazy as to where they came from. They grew up in Los Angeles, and, when they were still children, their parents did form a family band called Rockinhaim with them, so it's clear that they were immersed in music from an early age—one could say, bred for it. But Rockinhaim wasn't exactly the Jackson 5, and I haven't dug up much else that would lead me to attribute HAIM's rapid ascent to nepotism.

Letting the music speak for itself, their songs did grow on me, and I found the much-anticipated Days Are Gone to be a pleasingly rich and full offering, blending layered three-part harmonies, polished verse-chorus structure, and dashes of folk and R&B in a pop rock album that feels both retro and current. In those two weeks between the album's release and HAIM's show at the Casbah, my anticipation to see them live built quite high.

The actual show left me with mixed feelings. After all the anticipation, it felt like a really short show, and they didn't even play all their singles. The venue, as I said, is not really conducive to a great listening experience. The poor acoustics mean that the songs will obviously not sound anywhere near as good as on the album. Plus, it was a really packed crowd, and fools were drunk and yelling loudly over when the performers speaking. The charm of the Casbah, I suppose, is that it is so intimate. If you were standing at the front of the crowd, you would have been close enough to get a high-five from Alana Haim herself. Seeing them live didn't enhance my appreciation for any of their songs, but it probably made me better appreciate HAIM as performers and as artists. In today's scene so full of manufactured pop stars, these girls are determined to show that they are nobody's tools.

The three sisters write their own songs, and all three also sing and play multiple instruments, which is something you maybe don't fully appreciate until seeing them do so live. And all three girls speak and engage with the audience, albeit to varying degrees, and have distinct and likable personalities. Alana, the youngest, would play to the crowd, expressing her affection for the fans, and gesturing to her ear to call for applause in return. Este, the oldest, would share anecdotes between songs, such as the story of how the last time they visited San Diego was over ten years ago, when they were attending an Eagles concert here.

Danielle was the quiet one, which was odd, because she was also the clear leader musically, standing front and center, playing lead guitar and singing lead vocal, and leading the rest of the band on timing. At first, I thought she was the cool one. She is, but she also gets pretty freaking intense while singing, eyeing the audience directly with steely glances, and jabbing herself in the heart any time a lyric contained a first-person pronoun. Where her sisters were playful, Danielle was all business, although, as the night wore on, and she would curiously recede into the background during all of Este's anecdotes, it also became apparent that she was simply an introvert.

So many of the songs that are now my favorites of theirs became so as Danielle's husky voice and staccato singing grew on me. I feel like they would come off much more generic with any other vocalist in her place. She's the most musically indispensable of the group. If the sisters were ever to split up and pursue separate paths, she's also the one I think could have the best chance of success as a member of a different band, though more likely as a guitarist than as a frontwoman. But I hope that doesn't happen any time soon, because I really like the sisters harmonizing together as HAIM.

Opening for HAIM at the Casbah was rock band Io Echo, fronted by Ioanna Gika, who kind of reminded me of Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, both vocally and in terms of her presence. Wraith-like in appearance, she left me questioning her health, both physically and mentally. During songs, she would perform Keanu-style martial arts moves, or sometimes dance erratically and seemingly unknowingly encroach upon the guitarist's area to her right, whereupon he would always, at the last second, awkwardly step back and yield the space without missing a note. For all her outlandish behavior, she would also come across incredibly nervous and uncomfortable whenever speaking to the crowd, which she attributed to drunkenness. Still, she seemed down-to-earth and not without talent.