Overstreet's Favorite Recordings: 2009
Here's a video that runs through my favorite albums of 2009.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3C7d6hnwkM
Before I made that video, I sketched out a rough list in order to encourage people to pick up good albums as Christmas gifts. The order was different then, but here's a glimpse of that post, which contains more details descriptions than the video.
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I'm posting this far too early, so I'm sure to revise it soon, but right now, here are my favorites in a very, very tough year. So much good stuff.
- Joe Henry - Blood from Stars
If I'd only read the lyrics, I probably would have picked this as my #1 for the year. Turns out the music is every bit as enthralling.This is an album about the kind of faith you need to ride out a storm, to find hope in spite of your own failures and wickedness, to learn from that experience we call "the dark night of the soul." And the music aches with the burden of suffering, pangs of guilt, and the depths of sorrow. It sounds, at times, like the music's being played in the hold of a ship on stormy seas, a ship that's about to break apart... and you? You're Jonah, beginning to realize the error of your ways.Some friends have complained that they're not fond of his voice. Okay, so Henry doesn't have one of the world's most beautiful voices. Neither do Dylan, Cohen, Phillips, and on and on. What I call an *interesting* voice will drive others crazy, and vice versa. All I can say is that sometimes, as with Antony and the Johnsons, the music soars because of the beauty of the voice: They could sing passages from a Stephenie Meyer novel and make it sound well written. Sometimes, though, the strength of a singer is not about the traditional "beauty" of his or her voice, but about the expressiveness, or the textures, or the characters created by that voice. Henry has one of those voices. It took some getting used to, but now I'm grateful for how it keeps my attention focused on the poetry of his lyrics.
- St. Vincent - Actor
A technicolor trip through one of the brightest, boldest new rock stars on the stage. Annie Clark's debut, Marry Me, was a knockout. The follow-up will pummel you silly with surprises and hooks.I so admire her efficiency. None of these songs wear out their welcome, even though they're stacked as high as a seven-layer cake with sonic sweetness and frosting and gumdrops. This album is just as fierce, fresh, and fantastic today as it was in the spring, and the louder you play it, the more details come to the surface.
- Aaron Strumpel - Elephants
Praise music inspired by some kind of holy terror. I shake when I listen to it. It's the sound of a man fumbling with the laces of his shoes because he's just discovered he's on Holy Ground.Full disclosure: The album is produced by one of my closest friends - Todd Fadel.Fuller disclosure: I somehow didn't know he'd produced it until after I'd heard overwhelmed by my first couple of listens, so my rating here is an honest assessment unaltered by bias.
- Allen Toussaint - The Bright Mississippi
I enjoy jazz, but I rarely hear an instrumental jazz album that affects me in a powerful, personal way. This Joe-Henry-produced record provided an automatic lift to my spirits every time I put it on this year. Either Toussaint and Henry have invented a new brand of jazz, or somebody needs to give me a name for what they're doing so I can go find a whole lot more of it. It's playful, soulful, surprising, and even funny.
- The Decemberists - The Hazards of Love
My favorite rock-band record of the year. But you have to hear the whole thing in one go. It's an epic, mythic story told through this song cycle, full of true love, enchantment, nightmarish villainy, and even more nightmarish vengeance. It's a fairy-tale celebration of true love, staged with an audacity and a disregard for marketability that you rarely see anymore. The commercial success of The Decemeberists represents great hope for creative, artistic musicians everywehre.I don't know why so many found it to be a disappointing follow-up to The Crane Wife. Okay, so it's not easy to pull singles off of this. Still, what an achievement. And who knew that the Decemberists plus My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden would be so much more exciting than just The Decemberists?
- Wilco - Wilco (the Album)
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot now has competition as my favorite Wilco album. This one gets better and better every time I play it. At first, the big rowdy rock songs won me over. Now the quieter tracks are sinking in. Some beautiful lyrics, moving expressions of humility and longing, and a band working together better than ever before.
- M. Ward - Hold Time
Paste magazine handed She & Him (M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel) their album of the year award in 2008. But this solo venture from Ward is better in every way: It's a high-spirited, contagiously groovy good time with literary lyrics, spiritual contemplation, and production that makes it sound like something new and like a forgotten folk-rock classic buried for thirty years. Listen to "Epistemology."
- David Bazan - Curse Your Branches
Simultaneously the most arresting and frustrating album I heard this year. I'm both dazzled by Bazan's imagery and honesty as I am aggravated by his over-literal, unpoetic interpretations of certain Scriptures: narrow translations that become the basis of his dismissiveness. (I know a lot of Christians who believe that the story of Adam and Eve is True with a Capital "T" without insisting that it is a play-by-play, documentary account of what exactly happened, but that's too complicated a conversation to have here.)Still, as a portrait of an artist who is in a crisis of family relationships as he is a crisis of faith, this plays like a spiritual grandson to Leslie Phillips's The Turning. And in view Bazan's prolific career, this is his finest work musically, vocally, and lyrically. It's going to be very, very interesting to see where he goes from here.
- U2 - No Line on the Horizon
Even a middle-grade U2 album is more impressive than most bands' finest work, in my opinion. The high points of this one are very, very high but the low points are frustrating, because they could have been such great songs. It's lyrically more cohesive than anything they've done since Pop. Bono is finding new strength as a vocalist and a storyteller.
I hate to say this... I think most of the fault here lies with the producers, who over-produced some tracks, and spoiled the opening track with a layer of gauze. (Compare the album version with this more exciting version, where they actually sound like a band.) Nothing here blazes with the fresh energy of "Vertigo" or "Elevation," nothing has a groove to rival "A Man and a Woman," and the band goes too quickly and too frequently for what has become the U2 signature: the big, raputurous singalong refrains of "Ohhhhhhhh oh oh!"
Still, "Moment of Surrender," "Breathe," "White as Snow," and "Magnificent" prove that U2 can still surprise, thrill, and elevate its audience, and "Unknown Caller" shows they still relish the right to be brilliantly ridiculous.
- Iron and Wine - Around the Well
It plays like a best-of collection, and yet most of it I've never heard before. Not a bad track on the whole thing.
- Neko Case - Middle Cyclone
I think it's Neko's strongest work, both musically and lyrically. It's a great record about how you'll get burned if you look to Mother Nature for Motherly Love, and about how romantic love can be just as unpredictable and devastating. These songs should only be sung in a voice like a tornado. Never turn your back on Neko Case.
- FOUR-WAY LIVE ALBUM TIE:
Leonard Cohen - Live in LondonA perfect showcase for Leonard Cohen's lyrics and banter.
Over the Rhine - Live from Nowhere, Volume 4
The finest live collection yet from the band, a rip-roaring rollercoaster ride through the best songs of their first decade, featuring the original lineup of the band in better form than ever. Just listen to this take on "A Gospel Number," and you too will shout "I CRY MERCY!"
Bruce Cockburn - Slice O'Life
If this were Cockburn's farewell album, it would serve nicely. He's not the guitarist, or the singer, that he once was, but this album finds him enjoyably casual and still capable of surprising, glorious improvisation.)
Tom Waits - Glitter and Doom
Astonishing reinventions, a consistently surprising track list, and yet it all holds together as if these songs were meant as one cohesive album.
- The Clientele – Bonfires on the Heath
Okay, every year I do some catching up and start listening to bands that have been recommended to me for years. This year, that band is The Clientele. And I'm sorry that I'm late to the party. This album has an enthralling blend of the dreamy and the edgy, and it makes me want to hear earlier albums.
- The Felice Brothers - Yonder is the Clock
As this was a very disappointing year for a lot of us Dylan fans, there were plenty of other folk-rock efforts to keep us happy, and Yonder is the Clock is the finest I've heard all year. And I'm still fairly new to it: It might be higher on this list next time you check in.
- Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca
This is a very difficult album to love, but it's so impressive in its hooks and erratic melodies. "Stillness is the Move" is one of my favorite songs of the year... yes, partly because the lyrics are inspried by Wings of Desire.
- Andrew Bird - Noble Beast
Bird sounds less eager to impress; this is his most introspective work yet, but he seems incapable of anything less than beauty. The lyrics investigate what it means to be truly human, and ponder the unquantifiable mysteries of human life beyond the numbers. Listen to "Not a Robot But a Ghost" and "Privateers."
- Buddy and Julie Miller - Written in Chalk
Tracks from a good Buddy album, tracks from a GREAT Julie album... but alas, the two don't fit together very well this time.
- Passion Pit – Manners
It's a party on a disc, with lyrics that make you do some work. I played this on the commute to work, just to wake myself up and charge up the batteries. I like this bit from the Pitchfork review: "...it's the sort of heart-to-heart populist record that's every bit as sincere as it is infectious-- though Angelakos sings in a manner rarely heard outside of a shower with unpredictable temperature control, it feels symbolic of a band that's completely unashamed, not shameless, in its pursuit of a human connection."
- The Dead Weather - Horehound
Barrels of nasty fun, and the most engaging of Jack White's adventures beyond The White Stripes.
- Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society - Infernal Machines
What *is* this stuff? Rock? Jazz? Swing? I want more.
- Bat for Lashes – Two Suns
Sometimes she a little too fond of Sarah McLachlan's Easy Listening mode, but when she gets serious, watch out... here comes Sinead O'Connor 2.0. If I were in high school, I'd have a crush.
- Sam Phillips - Hypnotists in Paris, Cold Dark Night, and other music available on The Long Play
It was the best idea from a musician this year: Sam Phillips subscription service, offering subscribers exclusive EPs, audio commentaries, exclusive videos, journal entries, photographs, and so much more. It's a membership to a club full of ideas, good company, surprise special guests (like Joe Henry!), and a community of people who all appreciate one of America's best songwriters.
And the songs do not disappoint. Her Christmas EP is now essential holiday listening at Overstreet Headquarters.)
- Elvis Perkins in Dearland — Elvis Perkins in Dearland
It's a little too controlled for me, but the songs and the album's cohesiveness are very impressive.
- Dark Was the Night
This is one of those rare various-artists projects in which there are two good songs for every clunker. Sufjan Stevens and My Brightest Diamond steal the show, but it's quite a show all the way through.
- Dave Perkins -- Pistol City Holiness
If you're wondering where the punk-blues spirit of Chagall Guevara went, it turns out it never left Dave Perkins. Handle with oven mitts.
- Circulatory System - Signal Morning
Fuzzy, frantic four-track bursting with great ideas.
- Dave Matthews Band - Big Whisky and the Groogrux King
No, I can't believe it either. I didn't know they could win me over. But I'm really into this one.
Other essentials:
Eleni Mandell - Artificial Fire
Unsettlingly sexy country-rock. The best Lucinda Williams album since Car Wheels, but not by Lucinda Williams.
Antlers - Hospice
Strange, atmospheric, and addicting.
PJ Harvey and John Parish - A Woman a Man Walked By
But for the vile title track, I'd say this is Harvey's best album since Stories from City, Stories from the Sea.
Amadou and Miriam- Welcome to Mali
A whole-hearted hallelujah of an album. I have a feeling if I could translate the lyrics, I'd be even more enthusiastic.
Antony and the Johnsons – The Crying Light
I can't take the lead singer's voice for long, but there are some irresistibly beautiful songs here, especially "Another World," both the saddest and most moving song I heard this year.
Eels – Hombre Lobo
More of the same, but that's not such a bad thing
Alela Diane - To Be Still
Diane is now high on my Artists to Watch list. This is a strange dream of an album, located on the map between Suzanne Vega and Beth Orton... and that's a good place to be.
Ramblin' Jack Elliott - A Stranger Here
Once again, producer Joe Henry brings out the best in a living legend.
Laura Gibson - Beasts of Seasons
I need to spend more time with this one, but I've been moved both times I heard it.
Still gotta hear new album by:
Stuart Murdoch, Two Cow Garage, Southeast Engine, Mountain Goats, Japandroids, and a lot more.
Letdown of the Year:
Bob Dylan, Together Through Life and Christmas in the Heart. So, two brilliant Dylan albums this decade, followed by these two which I quickly put aside.
I tried, I really tried, but I don't hear what others are hearing:
Flaming Lips - Embryonic
Animal Collective - Merriwether Post Pavilion
Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest
Washington Times on "Christian movies"
Reporter Bekah Grim of The Washington Times wanted to know why I don't get excited about "Christian movies."
So I took a long, deep breath, tried to remain calm, tried to avoid R-rated language, and I told her.Read more
Avatar (2009)
[This review of Avatar was originally published at Good Letters, the official blog of Image.]
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If you didn’t have one, you had a friend who did: The Big Toybox.
You know the one I mean: A wooden crate like the Ark of the Covenant, full of mystery and revelation. Opened and overturned, it set loose a tidal wave of miscellaneous pieces from a hundred different worlds spilled across the floor. Building blocks, LEGOs, Tinkertoys, adventure sets, action figures, pieces from unassembled model kits, game pieces, Mr. Potato Head’s features, you name it.
Childhood memories of toybox-diving came rushing back as I watched Avatar for the first time.
Drawing on almost unlimited resources earned from his past blockbusters, director James Cameron has made a movie built from the playsets of every movie he’s ever made or loved. Roger Ebert has famously said, “A movie is not about what it is about, it is about how it is about it.” And Avatar’s “how” is groundbreaking. It’s the most persuasive and immersive 3D experience ever.
But I’d argue that the film’s most significant achievement is not just in the “how,” but in the “what.”
Normally, innovations are employed to bring horrors and nightmares to life. Peter Jackson depended on New Zealand for the beauty of The Lord of the Rings’ Middle Earth, using effects to depict monsters, wars, and wastelands.
By contrast, Pandora is a whole new world of breathtaking beauty, exploding with wild new life forms that give soar, spark, prowl, pounce, gallop, and graze. Borrowing heavily, and brilliantly, from what he’s seen in deep-sea exploration, Cameron has built the most enchanting magic kingdom since Dorothy first stepped into Technicolor Oz. The first hour feels like something Terrence Malick might film in a rain forest in a galaxy far, far away.
As we fall under Pandora’s spell, it’s easy to understand why our wide-eyed, human hero—a parapalegic ex-Marine named Jake Sully (Sam Worthington)—finds himself in the mood for love.
By now you’ve probably read a dozen versions of the plot, so let’s sum up:
When his brother dies in the middle of an urgent intergalactic endeavor, Jake Sully finds himself recruited to step in and take his place. On the planet Pandora, humans are engaging an alien culture called the N’avi, and Jake—like Neo in The Matrix—is “the one” they need. They’ll wire him up, and implant him in an alien body (Shazam! He can walk!) so that he can infiltrate the indigenous society.
Scientists want Jake to be a peaceful ambassador, a bridge builder. They’re hoping he’ll writeThree Cups of N’avi Tea.
But the military, acting on the orders of the heartless adminstrator Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), and commanded by the trigger-happy Colonel Quaritch (an impressively scarred Stephen Lang), want Jake to be their “eyes on the ground.” They expect him to gather intelligence so they can move in and harvest a valuable ore called “unobtanium” which is worth a fortune back home.
The N’avi are tall, blue-skinned aliens who seem to have evolved as a cinematic insult to the Ewoks: Instead of pint-sized, clumsy, flea-bitten, and grunting, they’re willowy, graceful, well-groomed, and eloquent. So Jake predictably throws the plan off course, falling hard for Neytiri (Star Trek’s new Uhura, Zoe Saldaña), the alien beauty who mentors him in the N’avi language and teaches him to tame winged steeds called banshees.
Before long, he and Grace (Weaver), the scientist who trains him how to inhabit an avatar, are investigating the intriguing biology and spirituality of the N’avi. While the aliens’ faith is a mishmash of world religions calculated to minimize controversy, Avatar’s spirituality is admirably incarnational. Science and religion are not mutually exclusive: one informs the other to the better understanding of both. But soon, Jake and Grace must fight back against their own kind, trying to save tree-hugging natives from the pre-emptive strikes of shock and awe.
Uh-oh.
At this point, Avatar’s enchantment is disrupted by political speechifying almost as simplistic as the sermon that spoiled Cameron’s The Abyss, culminating in big-screen battles and familiar sights of bow-and-arrow natives fighting stormtroopers and machines. Cameron’s made tremendous strides in filmmaking science, but his storytelling is a feat of consolidation rather than innovation.
The New World, The Last of the Mohicans, Dune, The Dark Crystal, Dances with Wolves, The Matrix—Avatar’s as encyclopedic in its adventure-movie references as any movie ever made.Lawrence of Arabia? Meet Jake Sully of Pandora. References to the first two Alien films andAliens are everywhere. (I laughed when Sigourney Weaver made her entrance in classic Alien fashion, rising from cryogenic sleep in a coffin-shaped bin.)
Early reviews announced Avatar as an event equal to the release of Star Wars. But Star Wars’ visual-effects revolution was propelled by characters who became iconic for their attitudes, styles, voices, and character arcs. Kids may collect Avatar’s Dragon Assault Ships and Scorpion Gunships, but I doubt they’ll take to Jake Sully, Neytiri, and Grace the way we took to Skywalker, Solo, the Princess, and the droids.
Avatar’s also weakened by bland, forgettable action-movie dialogue, which may translate easily into international subtitles, but not into memorable, quotable conversations.
Most troubling of all is the film’s simplistic sermonizing.
The masterstroke of the original Star Wars' trilogy was its bold third-act subversion of audience hopes and expectations. Lucas made the villain we loved to hate into a redeemable human being, one who could be saved by grace. Avatar has nothing so bold or redeeming as that, nothing to discomfort audiences with the wild truth.
What begins as mythmaking devolves into political pulpit-pounding, a narrow-minded “war-for-oil” critique of recent and present-day American military interventions in the Middle East that sounds oh-so-2004.
And the N'avi are the kind of idealized culture that hinders meaningful storytelling. The pendulum of our cultural memory has swung the other way—from excusing our destruction of Indian cultures in the name of Manifest Destiny, to damning all Western advances and idealizing Native Americans as innocents in Eden.
So I’ll join the chorus in singing “I can’t believe my eyes.” But I cannot echo the recurring declaration that the movie is “mind-blowing” unless I mean that the movie short-circuited my intellect as I watched. The waves of toys spilling from Cameron’s toybox momentarily distracted me from the fact that what he’s built from them is flimsy and crude.
As an achievement in technical innovation, Avatar is phenomenal, a ride worth taking more than once, but as adventure movies go, it is impressively new in every way except the way that matters most. Its look will last. But its heart won’t go on.
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Also recommended: Steven Greydanus's review at Decent Films.
Five Auralia's Colors Confessions: "Summoner and Stranger"
The adventure continues...
Once in a while, chapters require several rewrites. But once in a while, they happen so easily that it's like I'm watching a movie and describing what I'm shown. This chapter was like a movie in my head. Maybe a filmmaker will make it happen someday. For now, all I can offer is the chapter I wrote.
Here are
My Top 5 Confessions About Auralia's Colors, Chapter 6 - Summoner and StrangerRead more
Browser: The "Remember me?" edition. Best Directors of the Decade. Lonely writers.
Okay, it's official: My life has become too busy for me to be a responsible blogger.
Let me try to make it up to you in the next couple of weeks, with a new video blog, my list of Favorite Films of 2009 (the Premature Version), my list of Favorite Recordings of 2009 (almost ready!), more Auralia's Colors confessions, sneak previews of Raven's Ladder, and a marathon of interesting links.
Oh, keep an eye on Imagejournal.org. Friday, my review of Avatar should be there. You'll also see a piece on Christmas movies there soon, and eventually my favorite films of 2009 will be counted down there.
For now, here's a tray of appetizers:
Five Auralia's Colors Confessions: "The Ale Boy"
He's small, he's quiet, and he lives with a painful mystery.
Here are my Top 5 Confessions About Auralia's Colors, Chapter 5 - The Ale BoyRead more
Tonight: A Celebration of IMAGE - Bearing the Mystery
You're invited to join me tonight at Elliott Bay Book Company for a very special reading and booksigning.
Robert Clark, Madeline DeFrees, Luci Shaw, Gregory Wolfe, and Mary Kenagy Mitchell will be reading from and signing copies of Bearing the Mystery: 20 Years of Image.
Here are the details:Read more