Nov. 16, 2005 - Issue #526: Sex, Lust & Love
New Sounds
R. Kelly
Trapped in the Closet: Chapters 1-12 (DVD)
(Zomba/Jive)
In the behind-the-scenes documentary on the DVD, R. Kelly proclaims that Trapped in the Closet, which he wrote, directed and stars in, will change music videos forever. But it’s hard to imagine any project ever surpassing Trapped in the Closet in terms of ambition, imagination and sheer jaw-dropping lunacy. A blend of hip-hop video, daytime soap opera and Jerry Springer episode, Closet begins with Sylvester (Kelly) waking up one morning in the bed of a woman he hooked up with the previous night in a club, and who then tells him to hide in the closet when she hears her pastor husband coming up the stairs. And that’s just the jumping-off point for an insanely convoluted plot involving Sylvester’s wife, the pastor’s gay lover, a policeman, the policeman’s slutty wife, a just-released ex-con and a supremely well-endowed midget—all of whom seem interested in doing nothing but sleeping with each other’s spouses and then pulling guns on each other when they’re discovered.
Now, I could score lots of easy points making fun of the overheated performances, Kelly’s awkward sentence structure (“How could I be so stupid to be have laid here until the morning sun?” he asks himself upon waking up in Chapter 1), daffy plot devices like the mid-intercourse leg cramp Sylvester gets in Chapter 4, the way the narration absent-mindedly switches from first to third person halfway through the story—but those “flaws” are part of what make the whole ludicrous thing so utterly compelling. Trapped in the Closet, despite Kelly’s egotistical posturing and his juvenile view of adult sexuality, is impossible to stop watching. It’s the WTF? spectacle of the year—and even after 12 chapters, the damn thing isn’t over yet! 4/5—Paul Matwychuk
Death From Above 1979
Romance Bloody Romance
(Universal)
Like Vice Records labelmates Bloc Party before them, Toronto’s Death From Above 1979 have released an album full of reinterpretations and remixes of songs off of their most recent album, You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine, plus a couple of covers and B-sides thrown in for good measure. But unlike Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm Remixed, which featured one version of nearly every song on the original disc, Romance Bloody Romance contains multiple versions of Death From Above’s more popular songs to the exclusion of other, possibly more interesting tracks. Tracks like “Going Steady,” “Pull Out” and “Cold War” are absent from Romance Bloody Romance, but both “Black History Month” and “Romantic Rights” appear four times, which gets just a tad redundant, especially since many of the supposed “remixes” on the album don’t really deviate too much from the originals: one take on “Black History Month” appears to do nothing more revolutionary than layering strings on top of the original song, while the Dahlback version of “Romantic Rights” just mangles the song into bad trance.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t some gems on Romance Bloody Romance. With its infectious backbeat and crunchy guitars, Alan Braxe and Fred Falke’s “Black History Month” wouldn’t have sounded out of place as the B-side to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” and Erol Alkans’ “Romantic Rights” adds Hawaii Five-O bongos and cleans up the original’s stomp-rock aesthetic to reveal a funkadelic, ’70s-car-chase-worthy jam. Really, though, most of Romance Bloody Romance feels a little thrown together, meant mostly to tide fans over until Jesse and Sebastien put out an actual followup to their breakthrough record. 3/5—Ross Moroz
Mark Bragg
Bear Music
(MapleMusic)
Newfoundland’s Mark Bragg paints the 11 painful tunes on Bear Music with his own colours, casting out lyrics that conjure up strong images (“Something here don’t smell right / Something must have spooked the cows last night / ‘Cause the milk’s sour and the beef’s bad”). Some of the songs are somewhat enigmatic, but Bragg usually pulls it together enough to weave a tale, while still leaving the words open to interpretation.
Too bad the music is often nowhere near as interesting as the lyrics. For the most part, Bragg cranks out some pretty plain rock songs—not a bad thing in itself, since he tends to work best with the killer groove of “Born Trade” and the heavy riffing and pounding drums of “The Letter.” Those songs don’t go very far of the beaten path, though, so it seems like it might be a good thing when Bragg makes an effort to dress some of the other songs up with a few idiosyncratic sounds. Turns out it’s really not. Bragg’s songs falter when he drops some ridiculous background vocals into the lame polka “Plans for the Boys” and the otherwise excellent “Which Doctor.”
While Bragg is on track to be a pretty decent songwriter, he could stand to focus his efforts a bit more. Because, right now, his music is a scattered affair. 3/5—Eden Munro
Explosions in the Sky
How Strange, Innocence
(Sonic Unyon)
When painters first begin a new work, they often start with only two or three colours, blending until they find the right tones to make their composition. Explosions in the Sky seem to approach music in much the same way. These songs grow from simple thematic melodies and swell into resonating aural soundscapes, conveying a range of emotions along the way.
Despite this massing of disparate sounds, though, the Explosions are able to retain an organic feel to their songs. The seven instrumentals collected here use contrast to create beauty, and shadows to emphasize light. “A Song for our Fathers” begins with a fragile tenderness that falls apart and then surges forward with a haunting intensity; feedback and reverb create tensions and melodic counterpoints. “Time Stops” sways mournfully around two chords and deep, earthy viola before plunging into schizophrenic crescendos of crashing cymbals and relentless guitars. The band recorded How Strange, Innocence in their first year together when they were just starting to shape their sound, and these songs capture some of the enthusiasm and naïveté of a band just starting out. But as the album title suggests, there is something intriguing about their fledgling creation that makes it hard to stop a song midway through, making it a rarity among the increasingly attention-deficit style of music we’re so accustomed to. With songs ranging between five and nine minutes, you have to be patient, but if you are it will pay off. 3.5/5—Jeremy Derksen
Octoberman
These Trails Are Old and New
(White Whale)
Marc Morrissette pretty much is Octoberman, at least on this record. Sure, he’s got some friends helping him out, but he plays the bulk of the instruments and the songs all belong to Morrissette. Born largely of the lyrics scratched into the journal Morrissette kept while venturing through Asia, Europe, and the United States, the album has a cohesive feel rooted in Morrissette’s observations of foreign surroundings.
Morrissette’s half-whispered vocals are mostly supported with a folksy, acoustic sound that is both good and bad. For the first few songs, the sound is welcome, providing just the right sort of calm background music for Morrissette’s voice. By the fourth track, though, it starts to feel a little old. The problem is that there’s nothing really new happening, so the songs start running together and disappearing into a blur of wanderlust, and for the most part, the songs just aren’t musically interesting enough to carry Morrissette’s wonderful lyrics. “Tokyo Nightmare” is the exception here and, by extension, the highlight of the album. The song shakes the sound up with a little shuffling electric guitar and some desperate vocals, and some musical changeups that leave one wondering what’s coming next. 2.5/5—Eden Munro
Dolly Parton
Those Were the Days
(Sugar Hill)
According to Dolly Parton’s self-penned liner notes to her new album, her “big idea” to record some of her favourite songs from ’60s and’70s was followed by the even “bigger idea” to get a bunch of the original artists and writers to help her out on the album. Well, maybe she needed to push herself just that little bit further and come up with the “biggest idea” of them all: hiring a producer to tell her when she’s chosen a song that’s just wrong. Alas, Parton handles the production duties herself and ends up making an album that feels like one giant misstep.
From the melancholy sounds of “Those Were the Days” and John Lennon’s “Imagine” to the folk of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and Pete Seeger’s “Turn, Turn, Turn,” too many of the songs here are ill-suited to Parton’s consistently powerful delivery. Her take on “If I Were a Carpenter” is a good fit, but the track is derailed by the personality-free voice of Parton’s duet partner, Joe Nichols. The only true standout on the album is a spirited rendition of “Me and Bobby McGee.” While the song has been well worn by plenty of others, Parton gives it a spin here that takes it someplace that it hasn’t been before. 2/5—Eden Munro
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