live-blogging the new Vic Chesnutt record!

Happy interregnum! Thought I'd take a moment as we sit here between holidays and presidents to weigh in for a first time on Dark Developments, the newish LP by Vic Chesnutt, Elf Power and the Amorphous Strums. I am so listening to it now. Or, if listening is too active a verb, then you can at least count on the fact that it's on in the background as I write.

This is my second time through, and I like it almost (but not quite) three times as much as I did the first time. And it's not that I was just crankier the first time and feel much better now thank you. The album is now a bit more familiar, and a little bit of familiarity -- at least with music -- can go a long way. With halfway decent music, I do get something of a rush from being able to think, "oh yeah, here's this song that goes like this." And you don't get that the first time through -- even if a piece of music is terribly derivative, I find myself having to discover the specific ways in which it's derivative. I guess what I'm trying to say is that even "Oops, I Did It Again" probably had to grow on me through a listen or two.

I don't think this can be a proper album review, because either you're going to listen to Dark Developments or you're not, and yes, perhaps I could sway your fate a little one way or the other, but I don't think I particularly want to do any convincing. Thus, I don't feel like saying too much about the album itself (not that commenting on the actual musico-lyrical content is any sort of requirement in most album reviews anyway -- I mean what am I going to say? "It sounds like Chrissie Hynde dry-humping a bust of Shostakovich"? Because, fwiw, it doesn't sound much like that.)

I will say that I'm grateful to the good folks at Orange Twin records for getting my mail-ordered copy of the album to me after an apparently unsuccessful first attempt -- I wonder if my mail-lady secretly hearts Vic Chesnutt.

I will also say that I cannot listen to the closing track, "Phil the Fiddler", without inserting "Joe the Plumber" into every stanza. The album came out, to the best of my recollection, just before McCain tried to revive the medieval name-article-occupation formulation. In this weird time of experienced people coughing up "depression" every now and then, this is an album worth reading some portent into. In a way that I haven't quite heard since Dylan's Modern Times, it opens itself up to a little interpretation -- feeling like a message in a bottle from someone stranded in the very near future (like three-days-from-now near). It's obtuse without being particularly obstinate. (I don't know what that sentence means, exactly, and I'll have you know that I wanted to work "oblong" in there somewhere, but it just didn't cut it.)

And I think I will be returning to discuss this album again. What's everyone else hearing these days?

Tribute

So I saw the Egg Babies Orchestra last week at the Metro Gallery. EBO is a local cover band, but they somehow rise beyond the discomfort that the words "cover band" inspire in the hearts of some music fans. Their schtick is that they perform each song in their vast and ever-expanding repetoire once and once only. And I guess it amounts to more than schtick, in that there's a bit of the new on display (even in the fairly straight delivery of these well-known tunes that the band has clearly practiced into the ground). Standouts included their renditions of "Video Killed the Radio Star", " "Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)", which they prefaced by saying they were about to play a song by Edison Lighthouse (as, indeed, that song is). I knew that I knew a song by said group, and thought that I probably liked it, but couldn't immediately recall what one that was. For a moment, I thought maybe "Ride Captain Ride", but then I remembered that's by Blues Image. Those Egg Babies should try that one some day. Anyway, that's about as far as I got with guessing, because they started in to the tune, and its opening brought me back around.

Such a great song. But, then again, no...

It's a very good song, but not great. But the arrangement and the production and performance on the recording add up to something great, and the EBO brought it that night. I'm still taken aback by how much I enjoyed the show overall. There was a sort of reverence for the source material, and everything was played pretty striaight, so what were we enjoying, really? I've seen wedding bands where they're not really doing anything profoundly different, but the fun factor just isn't there with the wedding bands. Was it knowing these were our one shots at these covers (at least by this group?). Was it the, dare I say, professionalism with which these tunes were rendered? Am I just too closed off and set in my ways to really take in new music, and was I really feeling relief as much as enjoyment to hear a whole bunch of songs I already knew? I dunno.

So I saw something perhaps a bit more perverse a few weeks back when I sat in on the local arts collective Wham City's production of They Should All Be Destroyed: A Jurassic Park Play. Yes, this was Jurassic Park, performed live on stage. The play, while of course taking its story primarily from the Crichton novel, paid heavy tribute to Spielberg's film of the same name, faithfully recreating a host of scenes that seemed ripped from our collective unconscious: the uncomfortable flirtations...the silly animated double helix...the arrival of the grandkids...the t-rex attack...and -- dear God -- "I see the fleas, mummy! Can't you see the fleas?"

Some of the pundits who seem to be omnipresent in just about every medium I encounter often pontificate on how we no longer have regular collective experiences in our society anymore -- usually the "there's just no Walter Chronkite today" argument or the line that goes something like "kids today with their walkmen, I mean, wuddayacallem, IPods are always walking around off in their own worlds." I'm worried about this too. The movies do seem to be one of the healthier remaining repositories for collective experience, so much so that Disney takes its movies and turns them into, well, everything: broadway musicals, ice capades, etc. The reason we have to do this, rather than just watching the movie another time (we'll do that too), is that we still feel like once in a while we should actually go see something happening before our eyes, not just something on a screen. I don't really know for sure, but I've always thoughts that the results would be, while perhaps enjoyable, kind of unsatisfying. With They Should All Be Destroyed, however, I was captivated. While some liberties were taken to comedic and other effect (the character -- whose name I don't recall but who was portrayed in the movie by the actor who also played Seinfeld's "Newman" -- sloppily ate [sort of] the better part of a raw chicken in the first act ), the overall approach seemed to be appreciative recreation of scenes from what has become a cultural touchstone. I left feeling both touched and stoned (metaphorically, in both cases).

So here's your homework. Is Barack Obama trying to "cover" Abraham Lincoln, or do the talking heads just really want him to?