Comments on: Quickies: More very short reviews

By: The Great Whatsit » Sounds: BW’s top 13 of 2006

The Great Whatsit » Sounds: BW’s top 13 of 2006 — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 21:18:45 +0000

[...] … on which a grown man sings so lovingly of his affection for a video game character (”I move him with my thumbs / He needs, he needs my guidance, he needs, he needs my time”) that he’ll make you misty eyed. How great is it that an album with this title won Canada’s first Polaris prize — the equivalent of England’s Mercury? Reviewed 20 April 2006. [...]

By: The Great Whatsit » Canadian weekend

The Great Whatsit » Canadian weekend — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 13:38:10 +0000

[...] The star of the evening, though, without a doubt was Owen Pallett as Final Fantasy. Fey, winsome, boyish, coy: these words don’t begin to let you into the world he’s created in two solo albums, the most recent of which, He Poos Clouds, I reviewed here a while back. He wasn’t dressed like Peter Pan, but he could have been without stepping out of character. (One memorable moment came when he tucked his violin bow down the back of his shirt to launch into a pizzicatto interlude: it stuck up over his head like an arrow in a quiver.) Owen began his set by shouting into the f-hole of his violin, recording himself, and looping the sound as a bass backdrop. On the album he’s backed with a string quartet; live he plays all the lines himself, stepping on pedals to record and replay loop after loop, part after part. There’s no doubt he bears similarities vocally to other vein-popping popsters like Spencer Krug, whose songs seem simultaneously painful to perform and catharctic, but Pallett is playing on a different level than most of his peers. Classically trained as an opera composer, Pallett writes songs that could sustain treatment by a stage full of singers. When I think of “chorus” in relation to what he writes, I imagine a Greek chorus, though one that’s been possessed by demons or demonic suburban parents, and it’s to his credit as a performer that even as a one-man act, he can make you forget that he’s responsible for every sound you’re hearing and each individual voice you imagine combining to produce songs that feel more like scenes. [...]

By: Rachel

Rachel — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 19:54:04 +0000

Fightin’ words, Bacon! Don’t force me to disrupt another Beatles/Stones debate by making an impassioned case for The Clash.

By: bacon

bacon — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 21:57:16 +0000

I don’t know dave. By attempting a direct ranking, you’re stepping into the quicksand of “The Canon”, which those of us weaned in the 80′s learned (with the prompting of the entire tenured English faculty sporting bumper stickers urging us to “subvert the dominant paradigm”) was wrong.

(an aside–am I the only one who loves those bumper stickers on Subarus asking us to “Question Internal Combustion”? Yet my favorite post-9/11 bumper sticker remains “Poodles are Pleasant”–how can you argue with that? Can the greatwhatsit address this issue please?)

Nevertheless, I support (however much it hurts) Parrish’s view that Kurt’s naive writing style is perfectly suited to underlining the absurd horrors that are his subject matter. He’s writing the novel version of Dr. Strangelove. Pynchon writes in a different style. Why put them head-to-head?

(By the way, the greatest rock and roll band of all time is without argument the Rolling Stones…)

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 21:05:23 +0000

Brian, the thing is, you would be bulshitting even if you were an English professor. ;-))

I agree, Vonnegut was messed up by his war experiences, like Heller, Pynchon, and Mailer. Yet somehow, those other three manager to write much better books as a result of it than he did. (Gravity’s Rainbow is so much better than S-5 it’s not even worht making the comparison.)