MUSIC: The Next Day - David Bowie

David Bowie was one of those musical legends I could never get in to. To me, much of his classic revered albums are musically fairly bland. I couldn’t listen to Hunky Dory or most of Ziggy Stardust, for example, and I’ve tried to listen to several other albums, but nothing really appealed to me enough. There are exceptions, though - Life On Mars is truly an amazing song worthy of its praise. The one Bowie album I do love is Outside from 1995, a truly spectacular electro-industrial masterpiece of modern songwriting. But for the most part, I never was a particular fan of David Bowie, although I do appreciate his importance and his talent.

Bowie is now in his mid sixties, and it is incredible that he is continuing his music career past retirement age with The Next Day, his first album in ten years. One thing I have noticed is that old musicians tend to be better than young musicians - while the former often has decades of experience in songwriting and the music industry, and has shaped their own style as trends evolve, young musicians find themselves sliding into a trend and becoming nobodies as soon as they hit the stage. Obviously this claim carries exceptions, but I’ve observed that for this reason, new material from old musicians is often incredibly unique, and as such difficult to associate with any particular genre. Nonetheless, I must admit I was pessimistic about this album, because the artist only has so much time before he runs out ideas, and with it being his twenty-fourth album, I feel my pessimism is justified.

Being quite late to the punch, I have never had a chance to explore Bowie’s previous twenty-three albums. The sheer quantity is enough to put newcomers off, let alone that the majority of it is fairly average. With that in mind, I’m going to review this album in and of itself, leaving context aside for the moment.

What’s most noticeable instantly about The Next Day is that it is, first and foremost, a pop album. It has rock elements, with hints of glam thrown in, but at its core it is a pop album. You would not be incorrect to call it pop-rock, either. The album begins with the title track, a pop song with a prominent even beat and a distinctive vocal focus. Not a lot else is particularly notable, any interesting motifs with the rest of the instruments are mere throwaways at best, and the song suffers for it. The guitar is strong, but played as secondary to the less interesting drum beat. So right of the bat, The Next Day fails to be particularly captivating. The first track is supposed to be a strong song to set the tone for the rest of the album, but Bowie has opted for a throwaway track to kick off the album, which to me seems like a weak choice.

This album appears to have a problem with having good ideas but not giving them enough time to flourish. Much of the album appears to embody a traditional pop-rock sound, instead of pursuing innovative ideas, and as a result often lacks atmosphere. The title track is a prime example, as is both Dancing Out of Space and Boss of Me. The former incorporates an intriguing siren-sounding effect which, if pursued, could result in a truly rich, profound and compelling work of art - but it abandons this good idea to keep up the catchy pop style. The latter also some interesting guitar ideas, but again, they are nothing more than throwaway techniques. Additionally, the guitar riff from Boss of Me is unsettlingly similar to Clapton’s Layla, which does it no favours.

Lyrically, The Next Day is actually very solid. Unfortunately, I enjoy reading the lyrics more than listening to them, because the lyrical insight offered in this album loses its impact when put to this kind of music. While the words themselves are very well written, the tone of the lyrics conflict with the tone of the music, and they don’t always make sense in context. The lyrics lack weight because the music lacks weight.

Despite all my criticism, and despite all its flaws, I still enjoyed The Next Day, and I think it has something to do with his voice. Bowie has a unique and captivating voice such that anything he sings sounds good, even if it isn’t, and at 66 he is still an astounding singer. The album definitely has its gems - namely Heat, Love is Lost, Where Are We Now?, and Dirty Boys, the latter of which is a strange, Tom Waits sounding track with dissonant guitar and a saxophone. For what its worth, The Next Day is actually pretty decent overall, and I’m left pleasantly surprised. Its main problem is a lack of consistency - it can’t decide on a decisive tone. At times it’s uplifting, upbeat pop-rock, and at others it takes a slow, dense, atmospheric and emotionally powerful approach; as a result, it comes across as inconsistent. Track two, Dirty Boys sounds similar to Tom Waits, while the next track The Stars (Are Out Tonight) reminds me of 90s-era The Cure. Variety is good on any album, but the songs themselves are not strong enough for it to work in its favour. I don’t have a problem with upbeat pop-rock if it’s done in a way which sounds and feels compelling, but in this case the pop songs on the album sound bland and uninspired, for the aforementioned reasons above. Too many songs fall into mediocre status, and The Next Day is, thereby, half-good and half-mediocre.

The next question which needs to be asked is this: does it need to exist? Looking at it objectively, I am not convinced it does. It’s solid, and interesting in some ways, but it adds little new ideas to either Bowie’s discography, or the music scene in general. In a way, it warrants the same gripe Nick Cave’s latest does, being that the entire extent of its purpose is to be “another David Bowie album”. Maybe Bowie has different ideas; examining the lyrics, in particular songs such as Where Are We Now, Heat, and the title track, as well as the cover artwork which is allegedly intended to symbolize “forgetting or obliterating the past”, makes me wonder if David Bowie has somewhat of a relationship of regret with his career. Which is strange; I would have thought anyone named David Bowie would think exactly the opposite. But maybe so, and perhaps this album is a very personal work from Bowie - perhaps he is dissatisfied with who he has become, wishes to shake off his old reputation, and become someone new with this album. In any case, The Next Day shows signs of being very personal for Bowie, and while it may not be particularly important to the music scene today, it could well be important for him as a person.

However, not much can be said about the value of idle speculation. What I can say is that The Next Day is a good album - not great, but not terrible either. It is possible we are entering an era of post-pop in the music scene, and if so, this album definitely belongs in it. I quite like the idea of moving away from pop as a culture, although it’s a bit soon to tell if and when it would happen, and I don’t see it being any time this soon. Nevertheless, I have to say my pessimism about The Next Day was unfounded, and, if nothing else, this album is certainly worth a listen.

FILM: Zero Dark Thirty

It’s interesting to note how quickly the US feels the need to celebrate their military exploits. Less than two years after the death of Osama bin Laden, we already have a Hollywood blockbuster about his assassination. It’s called Zero Dark Thirty, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who also brought us another film about the war on terror, The Hurt Locker. I enjoyed The Hurt Locker thoroughly, which was very well directed, employing commendable use of tension and suspense, and a great use of characterization.

The thing which brought ZDT to my attention most was the alleged controversy surrounding the film’s portrayal of torture. Many claimed it adopted a distinctly pro-torture stance, inaccurately depicting torture as being a crucial aspect of the search for Osama bin Laden and his associates, when in reality it supposedly led to the extraction of false and unreliable information, and was not, in fact, a key factor in finding and killing bin Laden. If you like controversial works of art, you will certainly be disappointed by ZDT, as the aforementioned torture is, for the most part, not a central them of the film at all. In fact, it only features in the first half hour or so of the film, after which there is not even a single mention of torture. I even forgot about the torture by the end, which made me wonder why there was even any fuss about it in the first place.

Is it pro-torture? I don’t think so. It does undeniably show torture as being an asset in the search for bin Laden, but I don’t see why this must necessarily suggest advocation for torture. In fact, I would argue it does the opposite. The torture scenes are shown as very brutal and disturbing, and I commend Bigelow for not attempting to soften the true nature of torture in order to make it “screen friendly” (That said, I wouldn’t know for sure). It should be evident to anyone from this that the film is deliberately not making any effort to portray torture in a positive light. In addition to this, protagonist Maya is quite obviously very uncomfortable with torture, as we can deduce from her body language, and despite being hellbent on finding Osama almost to the point of obsession, it seems clear to me that she views torture as being both “a means to an end” and a “necessary evil”. In my view, the film’s exploration of torture is more along the lines of “Is it justified, even if it is useful?” Which is an important question for both sides of the debate, and it calls into question whether finding Osama bin Laden is a cause worth torturing for. Evidently, it does take liberties with historical fact, but it does so to make an ideological point, and I don’t believe Bigelow or any of the producers have claimed it was intended to be entirely historically accurate. It has the same problem Lincoln had, though, where I spent the entire film wondering exactly how accurate it actually was, and whether there are other important factors which have been omitted for whatever reason. But I digress - and as I said, the film is quick enough to abandon torture as a central theme, and for the most part focusses on Maya’s obsession with the case.

Zero Dark Thirty opens with with a 2001-esque black screen, with the date of 9/11 written in the center (coincidence?). This shot is quite a neat touch, only telling the story of 9/11 through a series of distorted radio messages played over a black screen for no more than sixty seconds, before jumping two years later to the invasion of Iraq. No doubt this has been played primarily for poignancy, to remind the audience where this whole debacle started. It likes to remind us that 3000 innocent people were killed by Al Qaeda, yet no one ever seems to notice that 3000 is a less-than-significant number in a country with a population of over 300 million. The film’s tagline is “the story of history's greatest manhunt for the world's most dangerous man”, but I don’t buy it. I’ve alway been very dubious about the true importance of killing bin Laden, and this film hasn’t convinced me. Maya remains obsessed with finding him long after the CIA loses interest, which implies bin Laden is actually much less crucial to the war on terror than I had previously thought. As a result, I didn’t get a good sense of the stakes in this film. But I can’t say I know a lot about the situation, so it would be unwise of me to say I know better.

Functionally, the film is rock solid. One thing I’ve come to realise is that good writing is not noticeable. You will notice bad writing, and exceptional writing, but not good writing, primarily because good writing appears natural and intuitive. That’s Zero Dark Thirty. There are some great exchanges, but for the most part the writing is just good enough to keep the story believable, which is the bare minimum for good writing. Visual effects are solid, the music score is appropriate for the tone, and the cast all deliver a solid performance, especially Jessica Chastain. As a movie, it’s virtually seamless from a purely functional perspective. I’d commend the characterization, but there is literally only one interesting character - Maya, who is portrayed as a multi-faceted human being with flaws and weaknesses, a drive, a passion, and a consistent personality. Whereas much of the rest of the characterization, get about as far as a bunch of serious white men in suits. Or in the case of the “canaries”, a pack of bonehead American males.

That being said, there is a slight inconsistency with Maya’s character. At the start of the film she appears as a timid sensitive woman who is thrown in with the men in the torture chamber. By the end of the film, however, she is a badass operative driven by her goal. One should remember, though, that the film does take place across ten years, and this could be a conscious reflection of how a decade of war has hardened her, but there really isn’t any in depth exploration of such implications.

The film skims across ten years of the search for bin Laden, and in doing so it spreads itself too thin. It constantly skips two-to-three years ahead periodically in order to cover the entire story, but doesn’t allow for a much deeper exploration of any given situation, despite being two and a half hours long. Towards the end, though, the time skips become shorter and shorter, to emphasise how important the final stages were, but the final mission drags on far too much. It is evidently trying to capture the intensity of the operation, but to me it was merely tedious.

Let me go on about the final mission for a moment. While landing two helicopters, the strike team on Osama’s residence make a hell of a racket trying to find somewhere practical to land, even crashing one of them in the process. Immediately afterwards, they try to stealthily infiltrate the safehouse so the residents wouldn’t notice. With the preceding noise, you would have disturbed a comatose person. It seems a little implausible, and it detracted from my willing suspension of disbelief momentarily. Shortly after, the soldiers murder two parents in front of their children, and then have the nerve to say to the kids “it’s okay”. It was doing great up until this point, but the final mission scene is both tedious and poorly planned.

But at this stage I can only nitpick. Zero Dark Thirty also has its brilliant moments, and can at times be a profound gut-wrencher. There is one scene in particular in which the second female lead, Jessica, is required to meet with an accomplice of Osama for information, who turn out to be suicide bombers, and everyone involved dies. It is a well executed, powerful and somewhat devastating moment, and despite being a little predictable, took me by surprise nonetheless. It is these moments in which I think Bigelow shines as a director, and I eagerly await her next effort. It’s also nice to see a film passing the Bechdel test with flying colours, and although I don’t necessarily believe the Bechdel test is the most important or constructive thing to be conscious of, it’s still nice. Despite its flaws, it is a profound film, and I definitely recommend Zero Dark Thirty.

MUSIC: Push The Sky Away - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Nick Cave has been getting an awful lot of unprecedented publicity recently. For some reason, iTunes has been putting posters for Push The Sky Away all over the internet. Literally. It’s a shame that Cave should be getting immense publicity for this album, as no doubt younger generations will latch on to it thinking it's the new and edgy “cool” thing, while missing over thirty years of Nick Cave’s back-catalogue.

Push The Sky Away is the brand new album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, released five years after its predecessor, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!. Compared to Lazarus, which sported a grungy, guitar-driven garage rock sound, Push The Sky Away is an incredibly mellow effort from the band, and I’m inclined to say it could even be Cave’s single mellowest album to date. It’s so mellow that I struggle to find anything interesting in it.

This is one of those albums that you put on and, half the time, don’t even notice it. After the blazing guitars and fast tempos rampant in Lazarus, I found the opening track, We No Who U R,  (an absurd title, by the way) almost a breath of fresh air. But unfortunately it seemed to take me for granted, as it sounds exactly the same throughout the entire duration of the song. A song which starts with an intriguing and interesting sound is certainly a good thing; however, if it retains this particular sound without any variation, it ceases to be intriguing or interesting, and merely becomes dull and repetitive.

The whole album is like this. From start to finish, every song sounds dull and uninspired, as though Cave no longer has anything worthwhile to write about. Musically, it contains few elements which are particularly interesting to listen to. Percussion is sparingly used, almost absent at times; the bass is barely audible and merely drones in the background - the most unimaginative possible way to play a bass guitar - and the album relies almost entirely on clean guitars and Cave’s voice to carry it, both of which do nothing other than drone the whole way through.

That pretty much sums up Push The Sky Away: it’s a droning album. Rather than evolve dynamically, each song tends to incorporate long, consistent notes and motifs, having little to no variation in structure or texture, and therefore stagnating. It’s soft, and mellow, and nice to listen to, but it’s not very good. It appears very “floaty” (for lack of a better term) and light at times, unsure of what it aims to accomplish with its existence. Lacking a strong bass, Push The Sky Away sounds very thin and empty for the most part; few instruments are being used at any one time, so there isn’t a lot of texture to the sound. Even the piano is used only incidentally, so any efforts to try to capture a large, uplifting and inspiring sound with piano chords fall instantly flat as the piano fades away after ten seconds. As a result, there’s no real feeling of sincerity behind the music. It’s a very lighthearted and carefree effort from the band, and as suck it’s distinctly shallower than much of Nick Cave’s previous work.

This brings me to the lyrics, which are as uninspired and insincere as the music. Once upon a time, Cave was renowned for his lyrical exploration of transgressive and dark themes. With this latest effort, his attempts to recapture those kinds of themes sound like he’s uncertain of what he’s trying to do any more. Lines such as “I have a fetus on a leash”, which could be quite profound and thought provoking in a proper context, seem little more than throwaway lines intended to shock a few people into paying attention to the dreary music. Another example is from the third track, Water’s Edge, “Think long and hard about the girls from the capital/Who dance at the water's edge, shaking their asses”. This kind of lyrical motif is common enough in Cave’s work, and has been used before to great effect, but in the context of this particular song makes no sense, and fails to make any strong impact whatsoever, coming across instead as merely shallow. As for the rest of the lyrics, I can’t say any of them are particularly memorable.

Perhaps I would be kinder to the lyrics if they were put to some more interesting music, but I found myself losing interest fairly easily, and as it faded into the background I stopped noticing the lyrics. Music and lyrics are not separate entities - they compliment each other, but when both the music and lyrics are mediocre, putting them together doesn’t do either of them a lot of favours.

Despite what I have said of it hitherto, Push The Sky Away is far from a terrible album, and to its credit it does have its moments. It isn’t good, but it isn’t abysmal either. Jubilee Street is interesting to listen to, and unlike much of the rest of the album it does undergo some dynamic evolution. Higgs Boson Blues also has some interesting things happening. But for the most part, it lacks a level of depth and complexity which has been present on the majority of previous Cave works. And as a whole, it’s fair to say it might as well be no more than a filler album - a mediocre effort to fill the gap between Lazarus and another future album. Its existence is not justified; its entire purpose is to merely be “another Nick Cave album”.

Nick Cave used to represent the dark and melancholy impulses and aspects of the human condition. He used to have a profound poetic talent shown in his wordy and complex lyrics, and a unique songwriting ability to invoke every emotional response one could think of. But overall, this latest effort is, for the most part, nothing more than a light-hearted throwaway album - an unambitious, uninspired and bland album. It could certainly be worse; however, if you wanted a mellow, yet emotionally inspired, atmospheric and interesting listen, you would do better to just listen to Your Funeral, My Trial again.