Five & Five on Friday 10/13/2023
Horror & Poetry
Happy Friday! Congratulations on making it to the end of the week. As you head into your weekend, here are five recommendations and then five micro reviews of albums from my high school CD collection. Maybe you’ll find something new to read, listen to, or do this weekend. See you next week!
This month may not be as heavy on gigs as the last, but that doesn’t mean its gigless. Following up our successful first show in Ridgewood, Laughing Stock are coming to Manhattan. I’ll be honest, booking shows in Manhattan still feels like a bit of a black box to me. The venue we’re playing is Connolly’s, an “Irish pub” on 45th Street. There’s a high chance of this being the exact opposite vibe you want to watch a post-punk band in. BUT! With all the talk of turning abandoned office spaces in Midtown into the next DIY hotbed, maybe this show will get you in on the ground floor. In either case, we’d love to see you there on October 27th.
My roommate Ashna kindly recommended my essay “The Summer of Barbenheimer” in their most recent Substack letter. I appreciate the shout out, and enjoyed the delicious irony of my most windbagged piece of criticism this year appearing alongside two reviews of poems where Ashna extracts paragraphs of meaning out of a scant few lines and references. If you’ve ever wanted to get more of the modern poetry scene, certainly not my area of expertise, I highly recommend Ashna’s Substack PAIN BABY.
I’d wager that a number of you are planning to watch a lot of horror movies this month. If you need some recommendations to fill the gaps let me offer you a few options. Now, neither of these are particularly new or unheralded, but hey, I’d never seen either of them before so maybe this is your excuse to catch up on them too. First, Jennifer’s Body directed Karyn Kusama, staring Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried, a piece of essential late 00s Americana that, in addition to its hilarious depiction of high school romantic drama at its most gruesome, perfectly captures the feeling of living in the wake of a national tragedy while being bombarded by the corniest indie bands on earth from every direction. Second, The Fly directed by David Cronenberg, starring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis. Jennifer’s Body is decidedly a teen movie, but The Fly is adult as hell. Sure it’s a gross-out body horror creature feature, but it also unflinchingly evokes the AIDS crisis and issues around reproductive rights in the context of a romantic tragedy. If you’ve got your own horror movie rec’s, feel free to drop them in the comments!
While I’ve got poetry on the brain, I really enjoyed this essay by Evan Fusco on General Things about Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”. Fusco’s navigation of how to approach a work of art that has been banalized by overuse and decontextualized via memes has a lot that can be applied to other mediums and other pieces of viral art. I’ve got to brush up on my understanding of “poor images”.
I’ve been waiting for an article like this one from The Fader for a while now. Nadine Smith final put into words the interconnected economics of Venture Capital getting involved in song rights acquisitions, the proliferation of song placement opportunities provided by streaming companies, AI-copyright detection, and sampling that has been swimming around in my head for the last year or so. Great work!
Now, onto the five micro reviews. Long time Lamniformes Instagram followers will recognize these from my stories back in late 2020, however they’ve been re-edited and spruced up with links so that you can actually hear the music instead of just taking my word for it.
The Sound of Perseverance by Death (1998) - Death Metal
By the time I got into Death the critical consensus was that they were *the* most important Florida death metal band and that they only got smarter/better over their career. Chuck Schuldiner’s passing was still pretty fresh when I was in high school, and that kept a lot of people from digging too deeply into the structural flaws on Death’s last few albums. This thing is riff city, “Spirit Crusher” alone could feed a metalcore band for an album, but a lot of the songwriting is haphazard. A lot of the time it goes “terrific riff salad - solo section - repeat riff salad in the same order”. When it works it works, but by no means is this a flawless record.
Awake by Dream Theater (1994) - Progressive Metal
By my estimation, this was the last “normal” Dream Theater album until their most recent two. What I mean is that it has no conceptual hook, no extra-musical narrative to contend with, and isn’t actively responding to the records before it. Because of that it holds up better than many of their other albums. Will it convince non-Dream Theater fans to get on board? Absolutely not, but it stands alone as a collection of tunes better than any of the records that followed.
With Teeth by Nine Inch Nails (2005) - Industrial
14 y/o Ian: “Oh boy! The first NIN album in five years! It’s got Dave Grohl on drums! Trent Reznor is sober and yolked now, I can’t wait to hear what he has to say!”
Trent Reznor: “A-with-A TEETH-UHHH”
14 y/o Ian: “hmm, ok…”
Ok look. This CD has the highest concentration of not good Nine Inch Nails songs of any of Reznor’s albums, but when its good it is REALLY good. The final stretch, starting at “Beside You In Time”, is some of my favorite Reznor material. And this album has my favorite art direction of any of his records. Military green + glitch aesthetics >>>
Neon Bible by Arcade Fire (2007) - Indie Rock
This is the first record where they really cranked up the Springsteen vibes. I didn’t quite understand that at the time, I was just excited to hear another Arcade Fire after three years of waiting (imagine that). An easy band to make fun of, but fuck it I think this is great. Their vaguely political stuff does not work, but when they aim for unspecified HUGE emotions they knock it out of the park. Raises the stakes of Funeral but doesn’t forsake the open heart of that record. “Intervention” is an all timer. “My Body Is A Cage” as well. Shame that Win Butler is a creep!
Entropia by Pain of Salvation (1997) - Progressive Metal
At first listen I thought this debut was unformed and sloppy compared to the ambitious stuff they’d follow it up with. It is definitely dated to the 1990s metal sound, what with all of the slap bass & slap guitar (!). But, uh, this rocks?? It starts off by undermining its own narrative authority and then runs circles around the rest of the prog scene both technically and melodically. I’ve spent so much time with the lesser Pain of Salvation albums that I forgot how sick their good stuff is. Highly recommended.