Album of the Month: RANDOM DESIRE by Greg Dulli

Interestingly, there was a particular moment when Greg Dulli started to make sense to me. It happened in 2014 when I saw a live performance of "Matamoros" at the end of Late Show with David Letterman soon after the release of Do To The Beast. It was incredible. In fact, it reminded me of a very special video cassette from my childhood that featured Duran Duran playing "Girls on Film" at one of those largely-forgotten MTV Unplugged shows. In 2014, having watched and rewatched that Letterman performance a dozen times, I knew there was something non-trivial and compelling about the music of the Afghan Whigs.

Both Do To The Beast and In Spades (the band's final album to date) are fantastic and, as far as I'm concerned, trample anything the Afghan Whigs had done in the 90s. Which is how it happened that Greg Dulli's first proper solo album was, to me, one of the most anticipated albums of 2020. 

What I love about Greg Dulli is that every time I listen to a new song of his I have no idea what is going to come next. Will it be some Afghan Whigs-styled rocker or will there be an Eastern-flavoured violin appearing out of nowhere or will the whole thing be based on a gorgeous, almost elegiac piano line? Or maybe all those things will come together amid the tortured lyrics of love and despair (speaking of lyrics, it was John Murry's fantastic version of "What Jail Is Like" that made me pay attention to that side of Dulli's songwriting)? 

Random Desire just sounds so intriguing. There's beautiful orchestration in the melodic and slow-burning "Lockless", there's that silky guitar line underpinning the unabashedly pretty "Marry Me", that propulsive bass opening "Pantomima", the brilliant violin section in the sinister "A Ghost". Truly, these are some of the best songs you will hear all year, with creative arrangements and well-written melodies. Absolutely top drawer. 


FEBRUARY ROUNDUP:

King Krule - Man Alive!
Greg Dulli - Random Desire
Makaya McCraven / Gil Scott-Heron - We're New Here
The Friends of David McComb - Truckload of Sky: The Lost Songs of David McComb Vol.1
The Necks - Three
Mark Kozelek with Ben Boye & Jim White - 2
Guided by Voices - Surrender Your Poppy Field
Nyx Nott - Aux pieds de la nuit

My Cultural Lowlights: BILLIE EILISH & THE NEW BOND THEME

James Bond movies do not thrill me. I like them as silent black and white backdrop in a late night whisky bar, but I have only consciously sat down and watched them two times in my life. I will fully admit that this is my loss. Like it is my loss that I rarely get to hear the music themes from James Bond movies. The ones that are so dramatic and yet so vapid, the ones that are played over the final credits. Like Adele's take from a few years back, for instance, that was not so much 'bad' as hopelessly 'not great'.

This year's Bond theme caught my attention. And how could it not when it is Billie Eilish herself who was commissioned to write one? Billie Eilish, the latest pop phenomenon adored by people as random as teenagers 'with edge' and critics 'with taste'. All of whom are, of course, deeply in love with the new Bond theme. 

Which - how should we go about it? - is not very good. A Billie Eilish song I dislike is of course hardly newsworthy (her album is made up of songs just like that), but I thought I would mention it as a recent lowlight due to the fact that this new Bond theme gets right at the heart of what I cannot stand about Billie and the like: it is so horribly, so inescapably contrived.

'Contrived' is not just a word. It is, I believe, the word. It perfectly captures Billie Eilish's vocal style as well as the mood of the times (bring back Adele!). She does not pull it off - whatever this 'it' may be. She just sounds awfully insincere. Flat, too, despite all the bells and whistles that go with her vocals. I mean, I do not care about this whole Agent 007 thing, but even I will not stomach it when someone sells me James Bond so fucking cheap. 

My Cultural Highlights: MIDDLE EIGHT

I rarely talk about Taylor Swift. Why would I? Whenever someone brings her up, I lose interest and begin to drag food around my plate. Whenever someone goes as far as to praise Taylor Swift's songwriting, I ask them to relisten to the middle eight of "Blank Space". Because however catchy the song may be ("Blank Space" certainly qualifies), a bridge like that is a travesty. It is, in fact, all the argument that I need.

My infatuation with the middle eight started in early childhood, back when I first heard "We Can Work It Out" on my mother's first Beatles cassette. It did not take a genius to figure out that while the verses and the chorus were brilliant, it was the Lennon-composed bridge that made the song. It was so good, in fact, that they had to repeat it twice, further highlighting the importance of that particular songwriting contraption. I distinctly remember the video of Paul McCartney's first live performance in Moscow and how there were people having fits during the "Life is very short..." bit. I felt for them, I sympathised.

Which is not to say that every song requires a bridge. Absolutely not. But to me, the ability to write a great middle eight has always pointed to a masterful songwriter. I get annoyed when modern bands treat it superficially or come up with something so laboured one has to wonder why they even bothered. I guess I can easily imagine a situation when the rest of the song is so phenomenal it tramples the perfectly reasonable bridge (Pavements' "Major Leagues", for instance), but in most cases this neglect is criminal. Especially when a band forgets about the bridge entirely, and the song in question is simply begging for one.

Needless to say, the world is full of magical examples. Great bridges off the top of my head: the soaring one in Ray Davies' "I Go To Sleep", the clever one in The Byrds' version of "All I Really Want To Do", the dazzling and poetic one in Alela Diane's "Nothing I Can Do"... And then there is the onslaught of gorgeous middle eights in The Velvets' "I'm Sticking With You". And then there is, of course, the small matter of The Pixies' "Monkey Gone To Heaven", a song that is basically just a buildup for what could well be the greatest bridge of all time. 

In other words, I am all for launching a petition to get great middle eights back into music business. You are a songwriter who can't write one? Get a different job or go back to school. 

travelling notes (cxx)

Three questions from The Hermitage Museum:

1. Is there a painting scarier than "White House at Night" by Van Gogh?
2. Is there a painting more hypnotic than "The Lunch" by Velasquez?
3. Is there a painting better than "Children in a Room" by Vuillard?

Скетчи про Минск. Шрага Царфин.

У немцев есть слово на каждый случай. Думаю, найдется у них что-нибудь и для странного и немного неловкого чувства вины, которое обрушивается на голову, когда выходишь из огромного музея и понимаешь, что времени и сил хватило лишь на несколько залов. Это должно быть сложное и очень длинное слово, но всякий раз я безуспешно пытаюсь его придумать, когда двери Прадо или Эрмитажа закрываются за моей спиной во второй раз. И я думаю о десятках или даже сотнях картин, которые рассеялись и рассыпались на мелкие кусочки. Я думаю о названиях, которых никогда не вспомню. Но - хуже всего! - я думаю о тех залах, которые и вовсе остались непройденными.

Так что я полюбил маленькие галереи и маленькие выставки на один или на два зала. Уверен: те полчаса, что я проведу на втором этаже Дворца искусств, будут стоить не меньше Дрезденской картинной галереи. Это сложная и неуютная мысль, но с ней приходится мириться. Так, на втором этаже упомянутой галереи на Козлова можно бесконечно смотреть на несколько работ белорусских художников Парижской школы. Это Осип Любич, Хаим Сутин (чье имя так забавно произносит Люк Хейнс в "Junk Shop Clothes"), Михаил Кикоин и Шрага Царфин. Из них о последнем, о Царфине, я узнал несколько недель назад. В безымянном журнале, который без дела лежал в салоне самолета, писали о первой минской выставке Шраги Царфина в Национальном художественном музее. 

Это небольшая выставка, с тремя десятками картин, документальным фильмом и несколькими личными вещами художника. Выставка Царфина - воздух для этой страны. В ней невероятная концентрация цвета и вкуса, которые не смогли наполнить белорусское воображение двадцатого века и потому взрывались яркими вспышками не то в Париже, не то в Нью-Йорке (в случае, например, Абрама Маневича). И нет, я не ставил бы Царфина в один ряд с Шагалом или тем же Сутином (с которым они дружили; оба, кстати, из одного и того же поселка Минской области), но он еще один потерянный и на время обретенный белорусский художник с уникальным стилем и трудной историей.

И вот по этой концентрации воздуха, а также безусловной художественной ценности - сегодняшняя выставка уникальна. Когда смотришь документальный фильм о Царфине, о его полузабытой жизни в Израиле, а потом во Франции, когда слышишь его неспешный голос, когда проходишь мимо этих парижских влюбленных и этого безумного и такого настоящего снега, то переполняет странное чувство тоски по тому, чье время уже прошло. Как никогда понимаешь, что у этой страны раздавлено не только воображение, но и чувство вкуса... И потому здесь, в этих двух маленьких залах минского музея, от него начинает кружится голова.