CRAWLING BACK TO YOU: MY 2013 IN MUSIC

Turns out, despite promises to the contrary, this year's disclaimer is last year's disclaimer but then, you don't even have to scroll down the page to parse that: nope, there are still no annotations to the songs, that's two years in a row and my excuse is similarly, embarrassingly, boringly the same. But hey, at least there's a list of albums, which I didn't have last year and which I've never annotated and only recently ranked, and which demands a disclaimer all its own pertaining to how mutable said ranking is. That's out of how I listened to a lot of them late in the year and often casually at that. Without intending to, for instance, I ignored Yeesuz for months. I'm still listening to the bottom five now and I'm fighting the urge to shuffle the order. I stand by my love for all 13, though, as I do the others that didn't quite make the cut but I now feel should have (Nick Cave, Foxygen, Ariana Grande), and as I do, too, the 40 tracks (not singles, though some of them are) in the list that follows.

Both lists, incidentally, are dominated by one band. That's another significant alteration of the rules, the spilling over from one list to the next, which I disallowed from the get-go, and which, up until the first draft of this year's list, I stringently adhered to. The Monkeys' AM prowls familiar ground lyrically but the teenage kicks have been superseded by an after-party melancholia (more than half the songs are love songs) even as the music surges with libido and swagger. Bowie, in all his permutations, is its spiritual gunk, but fed through the urgent tropes of hip hop, although it's really not as simple as that. And as ardent a fan as I am, and as high as my hopes were, I never saw the record coming and certainly couldn’t ignore Knee Socks. The push and pull between the lyric’s romantic/sexual confusion/ frustration and the slinky guile of the music is really the perfect distillation of what may well be the record’s overriding theme: the yearning for intimacy against a backdrop of perpetual nightlife.

Having the Monkeys on my list is a no-brainer. If memory serves, I’ve had them on every list I’ve made. That’s another disclaimer for this year though. I lacked the time and energy, and really, the enthusiasm, for my usual modes of adventurism, relying entirely on a system not too far removed from the Similar Artist feature of music sites, which should account for the smattering of R&B inversions (Autre Ne Veut, Blood Orance, Inc) and girls with synths (Kate Boy, ChVrches). I also threw back a lot, literally. A larger chunk of last year's listening were old records I only recently stumbled onto for the first time, with this year's highlights being Van Morrison's Veedon Fleece, Bill Withers' +Justments, Townes Van Zandt's High LowAnd In Between  and everything by Jedi Mind Tricks.  But then again, save perhaps for PSY and Kanye and Beyonce and These New Puritans, nearly everything on this year’s list, and nearly everything I listened to, seemed, if not staunchly retro, then willfully derivative and referential. 2013 really was the year pop music threw back, too.

Bored Nothing's Shit For Brains wafts through like the ghost of a lost Alex Chilton single. Fitz and the Tantrums at last discarded their retro-soul preoccupations and full-hogged the mantle of this generation's Hall & Oates in terms of kitchen-sink pop gene-splicing.  Ducktails and Pure Bathing Culture were channeling Prefab Sprout with enough acumen and eloquence to seal the year but then Prefab Sprout itself emerged seemingly out of nowhere, and with a spring in its step, too. God bless you, Paddy MacAloon. Ariana Grande was similarly referencing pre-Emancipation Mariah and matching her early slew of singles strength for strength, until Mariah herself threw back to the days when she had no street cred and pretty much didn't need any, and the ecstatic result is quite possibly her most joyous single since Dreamlover.  And much as the laser-precise hubris of one coinage called Haim a mash-up of Fleetwood Mac and En Vogue, it was when they tapped instead into Long Run-era Eagles, right down to the bombastic drum figure that gave Heartache Tonight balls, that they had their catchiest, most sublime moment, which was also the second catchiest, most sublime, moment in all of last year's pop music. The first, of course, belonged to last year's queen of pop sleaze and who doesn't nearly deserve half the grief she's been getting from media wimps.   For the record, and for my money, Bangerz was solid. But We Can't Stop, overt drug references and hedonistic will to power and all, is a stone classic. Hang in there, Miley. And no, that wasn't a Wrecking Ball pun.

1. Arctic Monkeys, AM
2. John Murry, THE GRACELESS AGE
3. These New Puritans, FIELD OF REEDS
4. Yo La Tengo, FADE
5. Beyonce, BEYONCE
6. Blood Orange, CUPID DELUXE
7. The National, TROUBLE WILL FIND ME
8. Ducktails, THE FLOWER LANE
9. Justin Timberlake, THE 20/20 EXPERIENCE
10. Mayer Hawthorne, WHERE DOES THIS DOOR GO?
11. Kanye West, YEESUZ
12. My Bloody Valentine, MBV
13. Fitz And The Tantrums, MORE THAN JUST A DREAM

1. Arctic Monkeys, Knee Socks

2. Suede, It Starts And Ends With You

3. PSY, Gentleman

4. John Murry, ¿No Te Da Ganas De Reir

5. Summer Camp, Pink Summer

6. Bored Nothing, Shit for Brains

7. Ducktails, Letter of Intent

8. Justin Timberlake, Blue Ocean Floor 

9. Prefab Sprout, Billy

10. Phosphorescent, Ride On Right On

11. Miley Cyrus, We Can't Stop 

12. ChVrches, Gun

13. The National, Don't Swallow The Cap

14. Beyonce, XO

15. Kanye West, Blood on the Leaves

16. Okkervil River, Pink Slips

17. Mariah Carey with Miguel, Beautiful

18. Fitz And The Tantrums, Fool's Gold

19. Rose Elinor Dougall, Strange Warnings

20. Daughter, Smother

21. Daft Punk, Giorgio By Moroder

22. Let's Buy Happiness, Run

23. Tegan And Sara, I Was A Fool

24. Pure Bathing Culture, Pendulum

25. Ariana Grande, Almost Is Never Enough

26. Haim, The Wire

27. Autre Ne Veut, World War

28. Mayer Hawthorne, Wine Glass Woman

29. Blood Orange, It Is What It Is

30. Majical Cloudz, Turns Turns Turns

31. Kate Boy, The Way You Are

32. Foxygen, No Destruction

33. AlunaGeorge, Best Be Believing

34. Yo La Tengo, Ohm

35. Savages, Shut Up

36. Pearl Jam, Sirens

37. These New Puritans, Fragment Two

38. Dawn Richards, 86

39. Matt Berry, Medicine

40. Inc.,Angel

ALL THE BOYS THINK SHE'S A SPY

"Ideologically, none of us should like the Bond films. They are sexist, heterosexist, xenophobic, everything that is not politically correct." (Professor James Chapman)

He was the flamboyant antithesis to the sober, conflicted British real world working class spooks embodied by Harry Palmer and George Smiley and Tom Quinn. Bond, that is. James Bond. Not so much a spy but a superspy, but really, The Superspy.  With an iconography that has exploded and calcified into its own self-contained rubric. Every James Bond film had a status quo to safeguard, from the voluptuous tremolo of its theme music to the softcore chic of its credit sequences, but it would also include at some point an ungainly, often unfortunate fondness for silly sight gags and sillier tech. At some point, Bond had become this jokey anachronism, a cash cow still but coasting on nostalgia more than anything else. Johnny English was having a go at James Bond, of course.  But Bond, at least in the films, eventually became his own Johnny English, a caricature of what was vaguely one already.

Dean Martin’s Matt Helm was having a go at Bond, too.  Having a go, specifically, at the lothario in him.  Bond slept around, sure. That singular trait almost superseded every other facet of his character. But much as the Bond films did objectify women to a point, one can argue that it isn't any more sexist than that laptop wallpaper of Ryan Gosling with his shirt off. Kingsley Amis generously described Bond's attitude toward women as “Protective, not dominating or combative.”  But Alan Moore, who appropriated the Bond character under a thinly-veiled disguise in his League of Extraordinary Gentleman comics, says otherwise:  “The overriding factor in James Bond's psychological makeup is his utter hatred and contempt for women.” And there is a sinister thrill in re-visiting the series with a firm grasp of this particular, and rather subversive, kink in his persona. Bond Girl is the collective by which these women are known, and they have in common, if nothing else, a latent exotica and a double entendre name, with Honor Blackman’s Pussy Galore from Goldfinger being the juiciest of them all. “My name is Pussy Galore.” she tells Bond, who retorts “I must be dreaming.”

But it’s Ursula Andres’ Amazonian Honey Ryder from Dr. No whom the world regards as the sovereign Bond Girl. And there’s no denying the charge of that first time we see her, emerging from the ocean in nothing but a white bikini. “What are you doing here, looking for shells?” she asks Bond. “No” , Bond quips, “Just looking.” Oddly enough, the Bond Girl never did adhere to this look. In the next film, From Russia With Love, Danielle Bianchi‘s Tatyana Romanova was neither as robust or statuesque, and was in fact, almost aggressively feminine, her strength being her demeanor, less of a co-dependent damsel in distress but more a pro-active ally.

The films pulled back on the history of sexual violence the Bond Girls shared in Ian Fleming’s novels. Pulled back almost to the point of ignoring it, their film counterparts having less turbulent backstories.   Significantly, too, in the first two films, both the swashbuckle and the promiscuity were also pulled back, not yet succumbing to the pulp tendencies and the tongue-in-cheek, outlandish vibe, nor to the alleged misogyny and xenophobia and sexism. The clause we sometimes unwittingly invoke to take pleasure in the Bond films without qualifiers was that they were espionage fantasies as fetish cartoons, that they were not to be taken that seriously. Because, seen one way, the Professor was right.  And so was Paul Johnson, whose scathing review of the Dr. No novel, boiled Bond down to “the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude snob-cravings of a suburban adult.” Still. Drives fancy cars, has a battery of science-fiction gadgets at his disposal, sleeps with every beautiful woman he happens to run into. Being Bond, even for a day, is the ultimate male power fantasy.

But if we persist in the argument that he was a remorseless Casanova, who only saw women as a means to an end, as necessary collateral damage to getting the job done, then we can break the Bond Girl down to two types.  Those who succumb to his wiles and often seal their doom when they do, like Solange from Casino Royale or Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger or Andrea Anders from The Man With The Golden Gun.  And those whose wiles he succumbs to or the ones where he meets his match, like Michele Yeoh’s Wai Lin from Tomorrow Never Dies , who not once felt she needed Bond’s help to save the day.

There are gray areas, the Bond Girls that are neither one or the other, and are consequently  the least interesting ones, if only because they were passive, a little ditzy at times and amounted to little more than eye candy, with Denise Richards’ Christmas Jones from The World Is Not Enough being the most vacuous of the lot. Jane Seymour’s mysterious Solitaire from Live And Let Die  does tend to fall into this limbo but she gets a reprieve out of how she seemed to genuinely throw Bond on a loop.  Grace Jones’ May Day in A View To A Kill  started  out as a foe, one who could power lift a grown man and parachute off the Eiffel Tower, and finished up on Bond’s side but suffering for it, becoming quite possibly the only Bond Girl to embody both types. Like Pussy Galore, except Pussy Galore managed to get out unscathed. They were both, of course, henchwomen. Sophie Marceau’s Elektra King from The World Is Not Enough was, significantly, the one calling the shots, the first, and so far only, female evil mastermind in the entire franchise, and canny enough to know what would break a man like Bond and almost did.

Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale was the bolt from the blue, the smite of no return for Bond. The Daniel Craig reboot was revisionism by risk management, sure, but it also meant to prop the sag in the franchise by realigning it with the real world, with its powderkeg urgency, with its existential angst, with its apocalyptic melancholia. With its Jason Bournes and Jack Ryans, really. Gone was the suavity of Connery , the cheekiness of Moore, the earnestness of Brosnan, and in its place was something a little darker, a little wounded, a little more vulnerable. Craig played Bond as brash, brutish, and verging on everything they tried to pin on him all these years. And the chink in the armors of men as fortified as he is here is always love  At one point, he tells Vesper “I have no armour left. You’ve stripped it from me. Whatever is left of me, whatever I am, I’m yours.” and that he intends to quit and run away with her. She, of course, sees to it that it never happens.

If we go by the chronology of the films, rather than the novels, Vesper is not the first girl Bond falls in love with. That honor belongs to Diana Rigg’s Teresa Draco in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the only girl Bond went so far as to marry.  Their wedding is quite possibly the most joyous sequence in a Bond film ever.  And in the penultimate scene that comes after, as the newlyweds drive off to their ever after, you get to feel something you rarely feel in a Bond film, a genuine sense of empathy and a genuine sense of threat. Here is Bond. The misogynist, the xenophobe, the heterosexist,  the superspy.  Rehabilitated by love but also made impervious to harm by it,  just before he is ultimately destroyed by the only thing that could: a heart broken in half by true love and an assassin's bullet.

*Originally published in Vault

CATHOLIC GIRLS

Giuseppe Tornatore’s Malena was, in hindsight, far less than its reputation would have you believe, and whose exaltation I’ve always regarded with mild bewilderment and pin on whatever residual goodwill there was left for its auteur, who claimed the world as his oyster 12 years before, after Cinema Paradiso somehow nudged Italian cinema back into the spotlight, becoming the universally-beloved arthouse film for people who don’t like arthouse films. Prey as it was to a gnawing sentimentality, Cinema Paradiso was nevertheless seized by this confluence of mischief and wonderment that gave it a litheness and buoyancy that was nowhere to be found in the middling, ham-fisted predictability of Malena. You can argue, of course, and to be fair, Malena has retained a coterie of die-hards to this day, but the only aspect of it that’s resistant to argument, or indeed, to dissent, was, and still is, the intoxicating smolder of its star , Monica Bellucci.

The consensus reality among cineastes was that, after WWII, neo-realism begun to progressively exhaust its surplus. Vittorio De Sica’s 1952 Umberto D. was sort of its last bow and more or less the point when Italian cinema began to splinter and diversify, into pink neo-realism, into Spaghetti Westerns, into giallos, into the vibrant climate under which the hormonal phenomenon known as the Italian Goddess would emerge and hold sway, tapering off in the 1980s and becoming, in 2000,  little more than remaindered exotica many times re-purposed by advertising into pop cultural iconicity. But here was Monica, on the screen, in the now, a few years before she posed on the cover of an American magazine wearing nothing but Iranian caviar, embodying its quintessence, rekindling its fervor, evoking on one hand, the earthy sultriness of Anna Magnani in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma and on the other, the robust sensuality of Daniela Silverio in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman.

Movie stars, of course, routinely undergo being clustered, some would say objectified, into collective, and predominantly physical, stereotypes. It’s branding. Boil it down and the Italian Goddess comes from the same fetishizing impulses that infect us today with Manic Pixie Dream Girls. Or, to bring it to closer and less annoying iterations, the Hitchcock Blonde and the French ingénue, both of which proliferated in pretty much the same 50s/60s period of overlap. But where the Hitchcock Blonde was all about icy mystery and the French ingénue about swoony obliviousness, the Italian Goddess was about a sharpness of feature so fierce it refused to succumb to either enigma or doubt, statuesque glories but leavened by vulnerability, feeding a fantasy of indomitable yet attainable beauty, navigating their way in a world sticky with the wiles of men. You think of Claudia Cardinale’s tragic bride being engulfed by the town in her first masterful sequence in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West, of Elsa Martinelli’s wildlife photographer turning the jaunty safari she joins on its head, and softening crusty old John Wayne while she’s at it, in Howard Hawks’  Hatari!. You think, too, of  Asia Argento’s call girl brokering a dangerous defection in Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel, and of Isabela Rosellini’s torch singer embroiled in the prickly suburban malaise of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

Asia and Isabella were the other two Italian actresses in the first glimmers of the noughties that had achieved similar measures of profile as Monica. Coincidentally, both were legacies, daughters of Italian cinema’s two most ubiquitous auteurs. Between the three of them, they managed to represent the various permutations that fall under the Italian Goddess subgenus.  Asia came on like a feisty iteration of her father’s giallo damsels in distress. And the parallels drawn between Isabella and Giulietta Masina, the waifish prostitute in Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria and his eventual wife and muse, more than make continual sense. And Monica, you trace her back to the Italian Goddess of Italian Goddesses: Sophia Loren, Italian cinema’s crossover superstar, whose allure managed to upstage even the shadowy elegance of Carol Reed’s optics in his criminally under-seen The Key.  Resplendent, ominous, heartbreaking Sophia.

But Italian Goddess  pre-eminence is something I ultimately reserve for and cede to the impossibly beautiful Monica Vitti, if only for the work she did with Michelangelo Antonioni. In Il Deserto Rosso, their fourth film together, the suffocation of human connection, the slow poisoning of whatever tenuous interstices transpire between its characters, is poeticized through blasted images of encroaching industrialization: a sudden shout of color turning out to be a small flower in an indifferent field of grey waste, a cargo ship passing through a line of trees, two men dwarfed by a gigantic and seemingly sentient plume of smoke. The fragile beauty overwhelmed by her surroundings and forced to burn through it is, in many ways, the précis of the Italian Goddess journey. And centering things here is the spectacle of Monica as a lonely housewife seemingly spiraling into madness. But is she really going mad? Or is she, in her colossal frustration from fighting a losing battle against this consensual deadening of emotions, the only one coming to her senses? In the film’s quasi-famous "orgy" scene, where everybody can't/won't/don't know how to articulate their hard-ons, Monica is the only one who opposes the torpor and pops those allegedly aphrodisiac eggs. She rolls them in her mouth, savoring it, before turning around to face everyone else and proclaiming ,with equal parts sarcasm and seduction, disgust and defiance: "I feel like making love." 


*originally published in Vault

SUICIDE BLONDE

Consider the Blonde. In the context of American beauty, specifically Hollywood beauty, the Blonde has always laid claim to the uppermost tier in the hierarchy, its fabled mystique perpetually holding sway, if only because the misguided perception of eternal youth it summons is the sole grist for the myth mill of Absolute Celebrity, and never mind the connotations of dimness and cruelty that go with the hair. Blondes, dumb or not, not only have more shelf life, but they do have more fun in the eyes of the world, more so in its far-out post-colonial Third World corners where blondes do not exist without liberal amounts of hair dye and therefore gain a sense of the exotic, of the ungraspable. And Old Hollywood had its own deep bench of Blondes, from Jean Harlow to Mae West to Veronica Lake to Marlene Dietrich to Jayne Mansfield to Hitchcock’s own little mini-pantheon, Kim Novak and Janet Leigh and Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman and Tippi Hedren, whom he collectively described to Francois Truffaut, in that epic interview book of theirs, as “the drawing-room type, the real ladies, who become whores once they’re in the bedroom.” 

None, though, had quite the singular ferocity of presence Marilyn Monroe had, what Billy Wilder called that “certain indefinable magic”. And , as it is with any star of similarly iconic charge, the James Deans and Bruce Lees, that is often enough. You can, of course, mine just the bookends of her short career and strike enough ore to justify the way she embodies the icon of the Hollywood Blonde. Her first role, in John Huston’s terse heist thriller The Asphalt Jungle, may have been tiny but it nearly upset the film’s balance of predominantly male energies. Her last , as a wayward divorcee in Arthur Miller’s misunderstood Western The Misfits  (see picture), was shot while she was in the ballistic throes of her raging addictions, mostly to alcohol and barbiturates, looking a little filled out and more than a little lived-in. And yet, even as the glare of her impossible prettiness had significantly weakened to expose some of her damage and most of her vulnerabilities, there she was still, at her most beautiful. You can make a case for the rest of her work as an actress, really, something that’s been undervalued and overlooked in the immense shadow of her fame.

Only Marilyn died a year after The Misfits came out, in 1962. And the icon she had become has since grown so colossal and so distant, so pervasive and so co-opted into the pop cultural parlance, that it’s been leeched of meaning, of nuance , of anything to do with who she really was or even what she really did, fetishized so thoroughly as to verge almost on caricature, on anachronism. Sure, everybody knows that shot of her standing over a subway grate with her white dress billowing, but how many have actually sat through Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch let alone know that’s where the scene came from? And yes, everybody remembers she sang Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend but are we remembering Madonna paying hommage in her Material Girl video or the original number from Howard Hawks’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes? This is what happens when stars get supernova-bright that they eclipse themselves.

Everybody recognizes Marilyn. But which Marilyn do they recognize? The little orphan who got bounced from foster home to foster home? The feisty ingénue who took it upon herself to rescue the dumb blonde from its stereotype by refusing to play any? The sex symbol who not only challenged whatever prudish conceits about sexuality prevailed in her time but turned them on their heads? The country girl who made her fallibility a facet of her persona? The global superstar inevitably beset and eventually damaged by the usual confluence of demons that come with being famous? The sultry temptress? The ditzy comedienne? The fashion icon? The brand? Because that’s what Marilyn has always been, at the height of her career and decades into the commodification of her myth. A brand that represented, superficially, an over-romanticized ideal of glamour, but also and ultimately empowerment and self-worth.

JFK was apparently the last person Marilyn called before her fatal overdose. And rumors that she was put to death, some say by Kennedy minions, some say by the mob, have always swirled around her death. Outrageous as the conspiracy theories tend to get, they do have a darkly poetic tingle to them, as if she were this fire who had raged too wildly and had to be snuffed. Whether it was assassination or accident or whether it was self-inflicted, her claim to the icon was sealed on that August day. Just as dying her brown hair blonde was a canny way to spin her career into motion, dying in the heat of her moment was an unwittingly canny way to end it, ceding her the one thing any of Hollywood Blondes never had: relief from obsolescence and with it, immortality.



*Originally published in Vault.

DANCE ME TO THE END OF LOVE*

DANTE PEREZ
1956-2013




"Lithium we know as a medication but one can misread it as a mediation and still nail it. The way it stabilizes frenzies that violently push and pull from both sides of the pole is a form of mediation, a truce of chaoses." (Notes on Lithium, Dodo Dayao)


He built a little village from the ground up, on a bluff in Zambales, then later burned it down, with gasoline and a makeshift torch. This was my first glimpse of Dante Perez’s prowess as a production designer. A potent image, for sure, but I’m resisting the urge to milk it for poetic effect as I don’t want to cloud this with anything less than forthright. Nor lay anything on too thick. One thing you probably won’t hear much mention of, in the flurry of well-wishing and reminisces, is how funny Dante Perez (Ka Dante to us) can be. And if this gets a little too maudlin, he’d probably crack a joke or two just to lighten the mood.

What this is exactly I’m not sure, though. A eulogy to a dead star. A valentine to a friend. A celebration of an artist. All of these, perhaps. But more than that, a way to make sense of someone leaving too soon. I realize it’s arrogant to assume one is privy to the caprices of the cosmos when it comes to comings and goings. I realize, too, that everybody ultimately gets a lifetime. And Ka Dante had one that was packed to the gills.

The tiny inferno in Zambales was also my first glimpse of the synergy he shared with Lav Diaz. Ka Dante was Lav’s collaborator and production designer and eventually actor, from Heremias up to Florentina Hubaldo CTE. It is, without argument, one of the most vital and robust collaborations in domestic independent cinema, of world cinema even. And yet it remained a largely unsung one. Which is how Ka Dante would have wanted it, I suppose. He was never a man drawn to the blare of the spotlight. He was always about the work. And he worked incessantly. He got restless when he wasn’t working. He drew comics, including an unfinished, wordless one about a Japanese straggler that he was going to show to me. He acted for other filmmakers, including Khavn De La Cruz in Mondomanila and Rico Ilarde in Pridyider. He made his own films, and his unflinching and often poignant feature-length documentary on Soliman Cruz, The Actor, has a raw, almost uncomfortable, honesty that makes its obscurity almost criminal. Before all this, of course, he painted. And had anyone known he wasn’t going to have another one-man show, the melancholia that permeated through his last, Lithium, would have seemed less residual and more prescient. The way Ka Dante explained it to me was that the new work was his means of grasping at transcendence. And much as the stark monochrome felt at first leeched of his usual color, his usual vibrancy, you do feel, in its place, a soothing sense of grace.

A couple of weeks before the opening of Lithium, Ka Dante and I were having a few beers at a Cubao X that seemed to be leeched of its vibrancy and color as well. It was a vibrancy and color we were familiar with and we missed. Six years ago, give or take, this was where our every night led us, talking about art and love and hope, all of us who were part of that ragtag community of like-minded friends who made films and wrote about films and worked on films and dreamed of films, and the future of the cinema we loved and the future of our lives as well was still fulsome, incandescent. That night, we talked instead about other things, about cycles running its course, about the parsimony of fate, about the infinite relief of art. But we talked about it in an oddly hopeful way, knowing full well we could easily rebuild that little village from the ashes anyway. And before he left us, Ka Dante, in many ways, did. “Sparkle”, apparently, was the last word he uttered. He was referring to the soft drink. But I prefer to think of it instead as an exhortation to all of us he left behind. Thank you and shine on yourself, Ka Dante. Shine on and live forever.



 *Lyric by Leonard Cohen
**This article originally appeared in the June 2, 2013 edition of PhilStar Sunday Lifestyle

JUST PLAY ME TWO BARS OF STARDUST

Sir (Chabet) and I hardly talked about art. I was in his class for only a semester. But we've been hanging out since. We did talk a tremendous amount about cinema though, maybe because I was the only one among us who was sort of into it to the degree that I was. But I was a misguided Hollywood nerd and he took it upon himself to set me right. He was like my de facto cinema guru slash pimp. And he schooled me. Every time we saw each other, all these years, at drink-ups, at parties, at exhibits, he always had some filmmaker I had no idea about that he wanted me to seek out : Bernal, Zialcita , Godard, Buñuel, Elaine May, Mike Nichols, Howard Hawks, Alain Resnais. And like any good student, I did. And subsequently got hooked. 

He pushed this Antonioni film on me years ago, raving about the ending. I have since fallen in love with it hard and seen it many times. And in its own odd way, that desolate and beautiful finale makes the most fitting of codas for the occasion. 

Thank you, sir. 

RIP.

DISAPPEAR WITHIN DISTANCE

This isn't goodbye. Just that the monumental tussle with words I've been building up to as far back as the middle of the year has at last begun. I'm writing, you see. Not just one specific thing but many. Which is my rather disingenuous excuse for not writing. Not writing here, at least. Not that I've been writing much here of late, I know. Do I owe anyone an apology for that? Sorry, then. And know that I mean that.  But in my defense, where life used to be what arrested the steady updating of this blog, this time it's been waylaid by more writing. I'm talking partially about pieces of mine that have shown up the past few months in places like Vault and Esquire and the Philippine Star and the Singapore Cinematheque Quarterly, among others, that I've chosen, for some reason or the other and entirely mine, not to cross-publish here. But I'm mostly talking about work that will not be showing up here either and will not be showing up for quite some time but will inevitably show up, in the forms the cosmos has meant for them to take and with the requisite measure of chest-beating and town-crying that befits someone like me who tends to physically wince at the prospect of self-promotion. I'd leave it at that as I'm also terribly averse to making pronouncements before the time is right, and it won't be, not for a bit. Everything in its right place.

All this, of course, is meant to disclaim and perhaps reassure that the silences you have been, and will continue to be, subjected to are not by-products of sloth. New writing will crop up here from time to time, I suspect. And I remain committed to my traditional yearend evaluations. This piece of internet turf is more junkie habit than thankless duty for me, I can't stay away from it too long. Also, more films continue to get made.

Not to get too melodramatic nor too precious nor too self-absorbed even, but the year has been a particularly challenging one for me, with regards to work, and by work I don't mean livelihood, and I don't recall any stock-taking that ensued in the wake of any pitfall to be this severe and decisive, nor this pro-active and crucial either, and I suppose that deserves some gratitude on my part. Much as it can dangerously be a persuasive deterrent, frustration has always been a reliable and enthusiastic impetus.  I'd like to fashionably proclaim this a hiatus but that would imply that I'm taking some form of holiday from writing, which I've reiterated enough times in the course of these three overlong paragraphs I'm not. Quite the opposite in fact. So call it what it is. I know most of you are used to the vacuum at this point. All I'm saying is not to get too used to it. And thank you for getting this far into my self-indulgent leave-taking. And to please be around for the eventual return.  I promise it will be all manner of winful and epic.

A MURDEROUS DESIRE FOR LOVE

In the dream, I was watching the Smiths sing a song I hadn't heard before and will never hear again but was beautiful nonetheless, and crying the sort of tears you cry at revival meetings, that suspension between ruinous and lifted that I merely imagine it to be given that I've never been to a revival meeting, nor  to a Smiths gig. It was an odd dream out of how, one, I dreamt it in the 90s after the Smiths had parted ways to become a constantly metamorphosing back catalogue, and two, I've never had much of a hard-on for gigs, an indifference I pin on the 90s as well, as the thought of the bands that mattered to me coming to Manila back then was beyond the ken of logic as to be impossible, forcing the pragmatic in me to take measures by throttling down any residual enthusiasm I might have originally nursed. The Smiths were my Beatles almost. They certainly were my Byrds, at least. And, hackneyed as it seems given the subject of the piece, they were the only band I literally dreamed of watching.

We all trace it back to Morrissey and Marr, of course, and whatever it was they had between them, that rarefied push and pull that transpires between frontman and guitarist, only with them it was more exacting, with no room for graying the area, for overlap. Morrissey took care of the morose wit and the erudite melodrama and Marr the ebullient melodicism and that way he had with his Rickenbacker that few could touch. It was the most fundamental division of labor between a frontman and guitarist, mirroring the stringent classicism of their repertoire: here was a band that never had a dance phase, a hip hop phase, an electronic phase, any kind of phase. A curious dynamic, sure, but one with a particular elegance. Once their alliance was severed, though, iffiness set in.  Marr tended to disappear inside every band he was eventual member of, becoming more rampart than color, never as exuberant nor as vivid.  But Morrissey was going out on sonic limbs, stumbling at first from the lack of a melodic crutch to prop him up, but eventually finding his sea legs. That's why I only have Electronic albums but have everything Morrissey put out since leaving the Smiths. And why May 13 was a date I would physically punish myself for missing.

But my tenacity was almost thwarted by the usual galore of deterrents: there was the excruciating lack of funds, the false rumors of tickets selling out, the eleventh hour scheduling of a shoot on the day of the gig and lastly, the lack of company to go with.  I had friends in the crowd, sure, but I didn't want to move from my place to go looking for them.  I would, later on, move around that is, looking for vantage points for each number. But before that, I just diligently nursed my overpriced vodka, waiting for the endorphin of anticipation to spike. It did but it didn't last. The sirens blared. And the band stepped out.

No measure of sobriety could dampen the euphoric surge of the opening song. How Soon Is Now? was both almost a given and out of left field at the same time. The effect of hearing its' colossal, ominous tremble pushed to 11 like that was physiological. Louder than bombs, right. My body couldn't make up its mind if it would pee in my pants or bawl in ecstasy. I did neither, thank god, but my knees were shaking as I screamed myself hoarse:"I am human and I need to be loved."  Alma Matters was the next song, quite possibly my second or third favorite Morrissey song, and the only one on that short list he sang that night, and was like my own bullish tantrum slash tenet:  " . . it's my life to ruin my way. . ."  Our angsts diverged many ways and it's not like his music put up a mirror to my own index of failures, my own ineptitude at happiness, but the songs always felt like fistbumps of solidarity, and almost comforting in how overblown and funny they most of the time got."This is not pop music. This  is opera!" he would proclaim later.

There's no way to parse a gig on paper that will make it meaningful to anyone else outside of enthusiastic reportage, it's bound to be different for everybody, and there was an immeidate spate of disappointments among people I knew, conspiracy theories even, of sets cut short, and of over-privileged brat hecklers in the front row. Admittedly, I came in there hopeful for a revue: The Best of Morrissey and the Smiths. I didn't get that, of course. But I was singing along to every song anyway, and he was working the table so fiercely, hearing First of the Gang To Die amplified by power chords or  Shoplifters of the World Unite raised to its anthemic rafters or Meat Is Murder with inappropriately, and therefore appropriately,  distressing images of animal torture, made me not mind the absence of The More You Ignore Me or Interesting Drug or I Want The One I Can't Have or Frankly Mr.Shankly. But I was still waiting for the last button to be pushed that would tip this over into the eternal. I started tearing up halfway through the first verse of the penultimate song: "Oh mother, I feel the soil falling over my head . . . " I Know It's Over was magnificent but tears were not enough, it turns out.

But  then Morrissey reclaimed There Is A Light That Never Goes Out  from Zooey Deschanel, and honed his encore, and the gig with it, to near-perfection. There are days I envy his resolute belief in the hopelessness of matters, and long for the force of will to surrender myself to the lassitude it brings.  But I am cursed with an innate optimism and an immense capacity for waiting. And mine has always been a blind, dumb hope in that light that never goes out never going out. In being reminded how desperately, how literally, I take that title, how I clasp its implications to my chest, and how I probably will until the day I die, I felt the night tip over into the eternal at last. I felt a  prickle of rapture appropriately tinged with sorrow.  I felt, in fact, both ruinous and lifted.

ARMAGEDDON HOPEFULS: MY 2011 IN MUSIC

"The culture with which I surround myself is a reflection of my personality and the circumstances of my life, which is in part how it should be." " (Nick Hornby)

In the end, it all came down to pleasure for me. Not that there's no melancholic surfeit here, there was the need to mope and to rant, mostly over the loose ends every year leaves you with, the ghosts I can't give up, the wolves at my door, all that. But the release you get from the songs you mope and rant to should count as pleasure,too. This list is unapologetically biographical as the connections I make with pop music cuts closer and closer every year, and I can only hope it's also bullish and solipsistic and contrarian, inadequate as cultural dowsing rod, charting rather the turmoils and ecstasies of my year and the reprieves inbetween. The far more burning urge was to dance, or rather, to reconnect with what made me fall in love with music in the first place and the small wonders that love can do for me: the hook-happy endorphin surge. I figure if the world really is coming to an end this year, then none of whatever troubles us now matters, except perhaps what little burst of pleasure we can muster in the face of it, partying, even if it's only in our heads, while hurtling to our doom on a headful of butterflies

Let's do this, then. Albums first, the records I listened to as wholes, then songs. As per usual.

1. Wild Beasts, SMOTHER
2. King Creosote and Jon Hopkins, DIAMOND MINE
3. The Indelicates, DAVID KORESH SUPERSTAR
4. Perc, WICKER AND STEEL
5. Rob Crow, HE THINKS HE'S PEOPLE
6. Mogwai, HARDCORE WILL NEVER DIE BUT YOU WILL
7. Fleet Foxes, HELPLESSNESS BLUES

8. Korallreven, AN ALBUM BY KORALLREVEN

9. TV On the Radio, NINE TYPES OF LIGHT

10.Taken by Cars, DUALIST

40. Panda Bear, Last Night At The Jetty: Tomboy was not so much sonic upgrade as it was sonic upsize, less a taking in of new colors but more a robust re-iterating of old ones, but while it doesn't get as obtuse as Young Prayer, it doesn't get as touching either, only this doo-wop colossus, with Noah Lennox grasping at a failing memory in full-on harmonic grandeur, does stand out, by a transcendent Brian Wilson mile.

39. Woodkid, Iron: Turns out I listened to this more times than anything off the new Beirut, which is surprising given how much of a Zach Condon fanboy I am but is no way meant to imply it was his failure or that Yoann Lemoine, who is all of Woodkid, is a rip-off artiste, just that I was distracted, and that this shares that similarly archaic old world aura.

38. Childish Gambino, My Shine:

" . . . why nobody wanna admit they like me just a little bit?" I'm not sure if the ramshackle nature of Donald Glover's rap is an aesthetic so much as a diffidence that works in his favor, here in particular where he vents his frustration at not being taken seriously with the sort of heightened bravado you find in the heat of the moment but tends to dissipate after you've flustered yourself saying your piece, which in this case, is a spot of bother I'm intimate with myself. " . . . when these motherfuckers gonna understand I'm serious?. . ." I feel you, man. I so feel you.

37. Toro Y Moi, Still Sound: Death Cab for Chromeo, something like that, and apologies to Chaz if that comes off reductive as his funk-lite inversion is fancier than the mashup implies, tempering the opaque introspection of his words by turning up the warmth of his sound for sound's sake ethos that's obviously residue from a love for Stereolab, making it perfect for a song about the comforts that come from the shapes sound makes.

36. Frank Ocean, Swim Good: Love breaks down, as it tends to do, and either Frank's committing suicide or merely using it as a metaphor for how much he's had it and is moving on. The title's an exhortation, of course, to himself, to anyone in the same rut. It also describes the sensuous way the song moves.

35. Avril Lavigne, What The Hell: For the rinky dink organ and the hollaback propulsion and Avril going all punky naughty frisky sexy on us and dispensing truths while she's at it. ". . .love hurts whether it's right or wrong . . ." Damn right.

34. Owen, The Armoire: The center not holding, when the place you call home grows clammy with un-belonging, is a hurt that’s hard-up for solace, and in using junk furniture to articulate the displacement that comes from it, Mike Kinsella doesn’t really offer any, but he does one-up his own tiny gift for quotidian minutiae, one-ups even Dallas Green, whose new one as City and Colour lacked the catch it used to the first few listens in. Not that I've given up on it, or on Justin Vernon, but I'll have to get back to you on those two. Mike's got this covered anyway.

33. An Horse, Know This, We've Noticed: Their Sleater-Kinney auras disperse a little here, but not my much, and not that it needs to. I’m thinking it has a shot at being my Our Deal for this year even if it lopes rather than smolders, if only for how emotive the rah-rah in its chorus gets and for how it invokes Dusty as much, even if it's only in spirit.

32. Adele, Turning Tables: It really was the year the world threw its arms around Adele, wasn't it? Oh, she's earned it, been earning it since 19 , and ubiquity aside, the pissed-off exuberance of Rolling in the Deep can withstand the neutering a thousand talent show contestants can visit on a song and is something whose swampy voodoo curdles with age. But this was the one that got to me, and gets to me still, the song not even Glee could butcher, the song that could possibly top Chasing Pavements as her career-high. " . . .close enough to start a war, all that I have is on the floor . . . " All that minor key roil, all that simmering indignation.

31. Wild Flag, Romance : In which Carrie Brownstein and Mary Timony and Rebecca Cole and Janet Weiss form a supergroup and rekindle their collective punk-pop perk and feist by attaching hooks on them big enough to haul cargo on, which in the 90s, at the height of their powers, or at least of their hipster relevance, would come off like some fluke post-grunge crossover, but in 2011 felt no less than truly alternative.

30. Fucked Up with Madeline Follin, Queen of Hearts: Pried loose from the massive punk rock opera it’s embedded in, you do get a sense of autonomy that gathers its own brunt without sucking at the teat of the big picture, which is to say you could make a single out of it, which is precisely what they did. Riffs with traction catchily pile-drive to its own blaze of pop rapture, and being the part in the story where boy first meets girl, the shaft of light near the end when Madeline from Cults opens her mouth makes both narrative and aesthetic sense.

29. Chad VanGaalen, Peace On The Rise: Feelgood hit of the summer turned lo-fi lullaby for the rest of the year, as disheartening as it is comforting, as broken as it is pretty.

28. Lykke Li, I Follow Rivers: She may not have the same husk and wallop but this girl group mutation had as much, if not more, gumbo and raunch as Adele's stompers, and as I'm not really in any mood to pit one against another, I'll take both, thank you, but give this a few nudges up the list, as I prefer Adele when she torches it down, and because that tinpot drum figure that snakes throughout is as exciting a use of percussion as the digital castanets on Robyn's Dancing On My Own.

27. Shabazz Palaces, Are You . . .Can You . .Were You? (Felt): " . . .my mind hides behind the music . . .” And that music is the sort that begets coinage along the lines of avant-chiaroscuro and dub-noir and prog-hop, the beats stretching and spacing out as if into a stoned soul fugue. If this is indeed MC Palaceer Lazaro a.k.a. Digable Planets’ Ishmael Butler’s manifesto, the music’s just the thing for hiding behind : nocturnal, obscure, sexy.

26. Drake with Rihanna, Take Care: Fuller of sound, and somewhat more assured, over time, the new Drake record might reveal itself as the closest he's gotten to a masterpiece, but given the limits of my immersion, and also given the catchiness of its hook, it's the title track that I lived with for quite a bit, more than Marvin's Room, more than Crew Love , if only because the he said-she said volley between Drake and Rihanna gets so delicious, I hardly notice when Gil Scott Heron butts in on the conversation and by the time I do, they're at it again. " . . .if you let me, here's what I'll do, I'll take care of you . . .", sings Rihanna, words she filched from Bobby Bland, of course, but is an endearment as eternal as it is cliched that also happens to be my last word on certain matters myself.

25. Niva, Ghost In My Head: That tasty R & B chorus repeating " . . .I think about it all the time . . . " as if it were a mantra of something Niva both dreads and relishes, should feel incongruous but isn't, infusing the spry little synth(dream)pop bubble instead with a buoyant prettiness that sends me for no reason and is on here for even less.

24. M83, Midnight City: That riff, that ebullient synthesizer clarion call like OMD sans the intolerable sappiness,the riff of the year full stop, cracking the song open and grabbing you by the loins then bolting and letting you chase it across the verses, half leitmotif half fugitive, until you back it into a corner near the end, throbbing in the backdrop teasing you to come closer, just before it detonates and takes you, willfully, gleefully, in its ecstatic blast radius.

23. Metronomy, Everything Goes My Way: " . . .when I took you back, I thought you'd up and run away, but you're still here, you're still here . . ." Halfway through, Anna Prior comes down from her disbelief as if to countenance her giddiness with a dash of reality-checking doubt by telling us how bad a boyfriend her ex was, but it's really only to give him room to sing a few lines to corroborate her optimism, before she goes back up into its ether. As irony-free a reunion of exes as Peaches and Herb, but at least twice as bubbly with delight at the thought.

22. Summer Camp, Better Off Without You: " . . .I'm better off without you . . ." so Elizabeth Sankey sings, and you know she's trying to convince herself as much as us, but the euphoric swell with which she sings it wins you over so, you take her word for it and hope she does, too.

21. Arctic Monkeys, The Hell-Spangled Shalala: Could be the tunnel vision that comes from being a fan, which is sometimes the point and the fun of being one, but Humbug and Suck It And See were not as regressive as the world claims, more like spurts of forward motion, really, albeit one bigger than the other. The pining on Love Is A Laserquest does get epic and has dibs on poignancy but this bouncy, impressionistic love song manages to slake my throwback fix without drowning me in my nostalgia, reminding me what made me love them and why it's a good thing they didn't stay that way, not to mention that it has the line that is not only my second favorite lyric of the year but what my year essentially boiled down to: " . . .I took the batteries out of my mysticism and put them in my thinking cap . . ."

20. Meyer Hawthorne, A Long Time : Rigorously old school as his artifice comes off, the touchstone here is really Hall & Oates, and that fertile period when they were mashing every mutant subgenre within arms' reach into the Philly soul that was their base matter. This earnest paean to Detroit may not be as protean nor as arch, but it has a keyboard riff so sexy it would've been sufficient to clinch this one for me, in case Meyer didn't have either the chops nor the largesse to write a song to go with it, which of course he does.

19. Mastodon, Curl of the Burl: There's the sci-fic erotica of Stargasm, sure, wearing on its sleeve as much as it can the prog they seem to be eschewing for now. Or perhaps the devastating elegiac prettiness of The Sparrow. But for each new vein they tap on the new record, I kept coming back more and more to the meat and potatoes, which in this case, is the Skynyrd/Sabbath crunch of the single, which opens with what could well be the couplet of the year: " . . .I killed a man 'cause he killed my goat, I put my hands around his throat . . ."

18. Those Dancing Days, Help Me Close My Eyes: " . . .I breathe with a hand on my mouth, I refuse to get poisoned and I swallow my shout . . ." A song that's not only about trepidation but also sounds the way it feels, its verses nervily pulling back, as if gathering the courage to build to a chorus that's not quite as sure of itself as it wants to be but has enough rouse in it to feel as if it is.

17. Jennifer Hudson, No One Gonna Love You: " . . . don't dare send me straight to voice mail, babe,I'm just gonna text you, hope it ain't no issue . . . " And she's telling you she's not going, boy. But don't be so quick to walk away. " . . .I've been through some things, please don't hold that against me . . . " She has and you shouldn't. Insensitivity aside, though, that throb of meta does help nuance what gets by on how underdressed her approach to R & B has always been, not letting any production garnish cross the path of her voice, which, like her love, is all she's got and often all you need.

16. Slow Club, Horses Jumping: Rebecca and Charles have always traded in everyday despair but passed, at all times, through a sieve of hope only here it gets so jubilant as to be almost defiant. "Good love is hard to regret, when you know it was real . . ." goes a line here, before it comes to the emotional boil near the end that's nothing shy of inspiring: "I wanna live where each hand you're dealt is enough so you never feel like you want to bluff, and every road that you drive gives you the crashes that keep you alive . . ." Hands down my favorite lyric of the year. You can't always get what you want but if you try sometimes, maybe you can.

15. The Streets with Claire Maguire, Lock The Locks: Mike Skinner's last bow. Wistful yet unrepentant, wry yet poignant, the last track on his last record is a last goodbye to the pop life, evoking the weariness he claims is his urge for leaving , buoyed by the certainty of his departure and the smoky way Claire makes that torchy chorus stick.

14. Destroyer, Chinatown: I suspect Dan Bejar's above mocking his own devices and that his tongue was as far away from his cheek as it can get when he sang this, veering as it does into a China Crisis by way of Walter Becker soft-rock haze right down to the cryptic lyrics and a sax solo that may be more Spyro Gyra than Bill Evans but goes on anyway to defy its predisposition for elbowing a song dangerously past anyone's thresholds of cheese, giving it updraft instead. Sibel Thrasher's harmonies are an unironic, unsurprising boon, too.

13. Radiohead, Separator: " . . .every woman blows her cover, in the eye of the beholder . . ." The last track on what turned out to be the second Radiohead album after Hail To The Thief that would inexplicably recede from both my attention span and eventually my memory mere weeks after first listen, but for this love song as hallucination, crooned oddly, mysteriously, gorgeously.

12. Memory Tapes, Wait In The Dark: " . . .this is how it ends we just stand each other up . . ." Dayve Hawk, like anyone with a pop gene as skittish as his, understands the protocols of pop heartbreak , how the lyrics confess pain and the music signifies relief, it's the most elegant of structures, the most empathic of co-dependencies. He also says insomniacs are like ghosts, two conditions I found myself in and find myself still, and this is a love song sung through the eyes of one or the other, about the separation anxieties of being so close and yet so far, set to his most effervescent singsong yet.

11. Fando and Lis, Nang Gabing Umiyak Ng Dagat: Full disclosure: I directed the video for this and my name does pop up on the album sleeve as "associate producer",which really only means I heard the tracks before anybody else did, but yeah, I'm biased, but then I also am with the 39 other songs here, and nepotism aside, this song and I do have a fair amount of history. I've always heard it stripped to the bone but adorned now with Khavn's piano curlicues and the way Ledh's voice aches and comforts and wounds, it becomes a song of unfathomable regrets for me to drown my own in.

10. Asobi Seksu, Perfectly Crystal: " . . .we've become what we've never wanted . . ." Almost a pastiche but not really, the way the latter-day Cocteau Twins swirl melds with the tasty My Bloody Valentine guitars that come in at the right moments and never overstays its welcome, and over which Yuki wails dreamily about the clarity that sometimes comes from disillusionment.

9. Flaming Lips and Neon Indian, You Don't Respond: Pardon the hipster obscurantism, as this was buried inside a one-off collab EP, one of many Wayne Coyne seems terribly fond of doing. I confess to never having been taken with their experimental nerve as I am by their pop fluency and a little pissed they could never quite manage the graft on these detours, as that would be wondrous, or at least sounds like it could be. This isn't quite that but it does come really, really close. Much as it's a cul-de-sac of a song, going around in circles, its glitchy anticlimax is weirdly catchy.

8. 2NE1, Lonely: It was only a matter of time before they slowed the party-hearty down, and not to say that this lithe, and rather grand, ballad doesn't have the goods, in and of itself, but it really is their unique alchemy that gives it a boost, and proves itself capable of turning anything Dara and Minzy and Bom and CL touch into gold.

7. Mates of State, Unless I'm Led: If you assume that every time husband and wife Kori and Jordan sing about a relationship, they're referring to the one they've been stalwart in maintaining all these years, then the minor key anxieties here are a glimpse of what they constantly find themselves up against and what they find the grace to overcome.

6. Low, Especially Me: Low has this utilitarian dependability that makes being a devotee less contingent on blind faith, and makes the occasional game change go down like magic. Having been a fan for so long, I never doubted their capacity for beauty and the way they draw forth balm from it. But this ghostly? This majestic? And this attuned to the truth? " . . . 'cause if we knew where we belong, there'd be no doubt where we're from, but as it stands, we don't have a clue, especially me and probably you . . .”

5. Rihanna, We Found Love :" . . .we found our love in a hopeless place . . ." Don't we all? The eight words that everybody will be singing and that rather ingeniously nails the way woe and desperation and euphoria push and pull at and sometimes bleed into each other inside not only nearly ever love song but nearly every relationship. Go by the words alone and it does seem doomed to futility, only Rihanna sings it with a strident sense of purpose to flip the script, which Calvin Harris' rapturous disco synths not only encourage but celebrate.

4. The Antlers, Putting The Dog To Sleep: ". . .my trust in you is a dog with a broken leg, tendons too torn to beg, for you to let me back in . . ." Peter Silbeman proves himself a few stations above the one-hit miserablist I always took him for, as every verse of longing, every cry for love teetering on meltdown, every plea for mercy met unheard on this tearjerky waltz, reveals a blade tucked in its folds, taking little nicks, drawing blood, hurting so bad, which is to say, so good.

3. Jay-Z and Kanye West with Frank Ocean, No Church In The Wild: Frank Ocean breaks the math down for you: " . . .human beings in a mob. What's a mob to a king? What's a king to a god? What's a god to a non-believer, who don't believe in anything? . . . " And Kanye and Jay-Z's spiritual crisis has to do with religious excess and existential voids and the obscene grandiosity of their own multimillionaire lifestyles, appropriately charged with apocalyptic urgency by that sinister Phil Manzanera blues riff.

2. Yuck, Get Away: Dinosaur Jr. for voltage plus Sebadoh for sustain plus Teenage Fanclub for immediacy, meaning its energies will dim over time but will re-up over time, too, and when it does, nothing can quite touch its catchy din for ecstasy, as is the case with it now.

1. Cold Cave, Confetti: Reining in the anthemic bombast that gave the new album crank, but hanging on to the Wayne Hussey affectations that serve him well, Wesley Eisold reverts back to the New Order he rode in on, milking a doomy sultriness from his overwrought melodrama, which, in all matters new wave and goth, is not a redundancy of excesses but a principle of faith.