Two Thousand Eight - 4. Islands - Arm's Way

Usually, even if I make an act like I don't understand why certain bands aren't huge and famous and popular - the Drones for instance, as Pitchfork noted in their review of Havilah last week, are one of those bands. But really, it ought to be pretty obvious why people wouldn't like them. They're just too bleak, and it's a very heartening fact, actually, that people at large would think that. Life would be significantly worse if everyone went around talking about war and death and being all, "maybe you should just die" all the time. Makes for great music, but not necessarily the type of thinking everyone should try to embrace.

But the quickness with which people lost interest in Islands is something of a surprise to me. The Unicorns' first record was justifiably received as a landmark of idiosyncratic turn of the millennium pop music, and like, girls liked it. Guys liked it. Square people and hipsters both liked it cause it was good pop music that was fun. Turns out, as the story goes, that the Unicorns were so idiosyncratic that they broke up before they could make another record. But when they reformed like Voltron into Islands and put out Return To the Sea, it was well received. I recall people saying things like, "I really like that Islands record".

So why then, did nobody give a shit when Arm's Way came out last summer? I'll admit that when songs get longer and less linear I tend to get skeptical, but it's not like most of the songs on Return to the Sea were straightforward pop songs. There's no "Rough Gem", yeah, so my best guess is that the indie rock listening public saw this record as an example of a band abandoning their true identity in the name of artistic progression.

C'mon though, I mean, and really. Besides certain lyrical themes (death, fear, illness) and odd pop culture references ("Ready to Die", "Don't Call Me Whitney, Bobby"), there's nothing that really ties Unicorns/Islands together as a style, beyond the mercurial personalities of their members. Whimsy, you could call it, within certain bounds. The real problem, then, is that it's not a complete departure from RttS. It's the continuation of the band's interests away from traditional pop song structures towards something more baroque and composed. The reaction to the record then, can't be a, "wow these guys do something crazy and original every time the come out", which was the mindset up iuntil this record, but that now needs to be modified in the direction of, "ok, here's a band finding their voice". Whims are becoming more explicable, messages are becoming more focused.

This record was not received especially well, I think, because it's a solid record, rather than a revelatory one. Every song on here is very good, but no songs on here are as great as "Rough Gem", "Les Os", etc. That said, Arm has moments of brilliance that equal or exceed any heights Islands/Unicorns have previously reached.

Examples:

The middle/end of "Abonimable Snow" is right up there with the Hair's "ghost" series in terms of expressing an endearingly naive, weirdly displaced, but very real fear of the supernatural.

"I Feel Evil Creeping In" hints more definitively than any previous Islands/Unicorns song at what, I think, anyone who listened closely enough to their first two records ought to realize: these guys are kind of bad news. They may be scared and their confused, but they've got a real mean streak in them. If you've ever seen an interview with Nick Thorburn, it's pretty clear that the guy is thorny in a way that's certainly different than the way, say, Lou Reed is thorny, or "rock stars" are thorny. You get the sense he's always had this charmingly innate distaste for things that could erupt at any moment.

The last two minutes of "In the Rushes". The main part of the song is sort of plodding and vague. Nothing anyone would be expected to remember or about which a letter would be written or a blog post written. But then - and when I first heard this song at a show in Montreal during February last year I broke into one of those laugh and smile fits that always strikes me when something totally wonderful and unexpected occurs during a show, usually regarding a new song or a song I've never heard before performed by a band for whom I hold a great deal of affection, once they got to this section - they break into an homage to/reimagining of the Who's "A Quick One While He's Away" that contrasts with the rest of the song in such a way that you kind of leave your brain for a hot minute. One of the best moments of pop music in 2008.

Two Thousand Eight - 5. The Killers - Day and Age

I love the Killers pretty much as much as any band that exists these days. Yep. Right up there with Future of the Left, the Drones, Max Tundra. And, as you might expect, I pretty vehemently resent the idea that there's no reason to put them in this kind of company. I don't think there's anyway around admitting that the Killers, unfortunately, have the market cornered on melodic pop rock music right now. Just because everyone else in their bracket (with the exception of everyone who unequivocally sucks) is way way past their prime - U2, Green Day, Fall Out Boy - doesn't mean they're irrelevant.

Of course, relevance has nothing to do with it, really. A good pop rock album out to be a good pop rock album and, in fact, is. Day and Age is a great album, as long as you consider albums full of great songs that have nothing to do with each other besides greatness to be great albums.

Something in the appeal that Day and Age and Sam's Town hold almost certainly has something to do with the fact that be very best music in 2008 was not made by musicians with thousands (? tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? how much money does it take to make a polished studio record for a major lable if you're not Axl Rose?) of dollars to spend in the creation of a pop album. There is something to be said for professional, high tech, clean sound, and not just in hip hop or "pop" pop music, by which I guess I mean Kelly Clarkson. Would these songs sound ok if they had used No Age's studio setup to record them? Maybe, but more likely they would sound flat and boring.

Brandon Flowers as a starving indie rock singer is commonplace: a dude with an average but impassioned singing voice and a stupid and flashy sense of style. If I passed the dude on Bedford Ave on a Friday night I'd wish to stomp his face. But context changes everything about the Killers. What would be annoying becomes charming, what's boring becomes exceptional. What would it sound like if you took the boring pop rock music and dumb, disconnected, naively nostalgic stylistic obsessions of the last decade together and threw a bunch of money into trying to turn them into something cohesive? It would sound a lot like Day and Age.

In that last paragraph I used the word stupid and the word dumb. The Killers are both and I love them for it. They have never recorded a stupider song than "Joyride", or a "better" song than "Goodnight, Travel Well", or a more a confused rambling Steinmanesque concoction than "A Dustland Fairytale". So, it's a broad album, yes, but I don't mean to give the impression that this album is good only because of its breadth, because, while depth is certainly not their forte, the Killers get deeper on "Losing Touch" and "Goodnight" than they have on any previous songs.

But a broad album is what this is, primarily. Broad in its appeal as pop music is meant to be, even if it goes largely unrecognized on the charts or the radio. I'm really looking forward to blasting "Spaceman" out the window of my apartment this spring and shouting "Losing Touch" out of a moving car when it gets warm enough to roll down the windows.

Two Thousand Eight - 6. The Drones - Havilah

I probably listened to the Drones more than any other band in 2008. This worked out pretty well, as I've gone through some obsessive periods over bands during some pretty awkward times in their existences, and that doesn't work especially well. The most intense period of my Radiohead admiration took place between about 6 months to a year after OK Computer came out and the the release of Amnesiac. Roughly a 3 year span, I think, during which time they released an EP, which is still probably one of my favorite records of all time, in any case, and an LP, which definitely is, and did not tour at all. I could just as easily have listened to nothing but Thin Lizzy last year and been left with nothing to show for it but some perpetual blue balls.

So it was nice that the Drones not only released Havilah this fall and toured in such a way that I was able to see them blow about 20 people's minds in a very small basement room, but also that they're definitely still at the peak of their game.

You can see what I wrote about "The Minotaur" for Tiny Mix Tapes. I won't bother saying anything much more about that. It's an amazing track and represents exactly what this band is capable of when they set their sights on boiling the blood.

But the Drones seem to be dead set on being the exact opposite of their name, and that means that they can't just be trying to rock out on every track. For me this is more often frustrating than anything else. Why does Kanye have to sing? Why do the Drones have to follow "The Minotaur" with "The Drifting Housewife"?

Please do not get me wrong. Sequencing is not The Drones' strong suit, but I think "The Drifting Housewife" is easily better than 80% of the music I heard last year. And since it's by far the least good song in the record, that puts the rest of the songs a pretty decent percentile. "Nail It Down" isn't as exceptional as "Jezebel" or "Shark Fin Blues" when it comes to Drones leadoff tracks, but it's still freaking great. "I Am the Supercargo" is a slow burn for the ages and I'm still fucking trying to figure out what exactly it's about. If you know, please tell me.

Unlike, say Thom Yorke's lyrics, or which are impressionistic in the "I'm just trying to get a vibe going" kind of way, this shit is impressionistic in a way that is actually trying to get something across. You know that "Supercargo" is trying to tackle topics, and you get the sense that it's doing a pretty good job of tackling, even if it seems like it's going in eighteen directions at once. Gareth Liddiard's brain is running from colonialism, some sort of narrative about a marriage, to straight up post modern dissatisfaction, and he's doing what he can to make it make sense, but it's more about just getting things out and that's more than enough. When it's focused, as on "Oh My" and "The Minotaur" the vitriol is fucking blinding, and when it's mixed in with more complicated shit it just takes a little more work to get the marrow out of it.

And lest you think I'm down on the ballads, "Cold and Sober" is the heartbreakingest song the Drones have ever committed to an MP3. Rare is the band that can kill you with violence and silence on the same record. Why are these people not bigger than Jesus?

Two Thousand Eight - 7. The Presets - Apocalypso

Everyone loves Cut Copy, and I suppose that counts for me to. But in terms of albums by Australian dance music groups from 2008, Apocalypso is better than In Ghost Colors. But that's not really the point. Those are two very different records from two very different bands. People were into comparing Cut Copy to New Order, and if that's true than the Presets are Depeche Mode. The bottom line is that Apocalypso is more fun than pretty much any other records that got released last year.

Which I realize is a difficult position to defend: Apocalypso can get kind of dark. It's got that kind of odd sinister sexy as fuck sedo-masochistic vibe that not only worked for the Mode, but for some of the best Moroder fueled Donna Summer tracks, shit like "Tainted Love", take it back as far as you want and the best dance music, arguably perhaps, has a pretty strong current of darkness running through it. And talk til you're blue in the face about Hercules and Love Affair, but there's really only two good tracks on there - Apocalypso blows that shit out of the water if you take it song for song.

Obviously, my love for this record has nothing to do with originality, topicality, or anything fancy like that. The sounds on here are sounds that everyone has used before, sounds that everyone is familiar with if you've heard the stuff I hinted at earlier. And it isn't like they're doing anything new with it, so here is where we get into a nice little battle about craft vs. art. But who's saying this is art in the first place?

There's some great synth sounds on this record. That thing on "My People" that sounds vaguely like background vocals but I think is actually a synth? That thing is amazing. Groundbreaking, no, but it sounds so fucking good and who cares. There's no meaning there, necessarily, so I won't try to explain it. The point of dance music is to unlock something that you generally keep under lock and key, and it does that with sounds like that fucking "na, na, na" sounds on "My People".

And "Yippiyo-ay"? How awesome is it that they named the song "Yippiyo-ay"? That's maybe the best song title since "Song 2", in as much as a song title is meant to represent the meaning of a song. There are other lyrics in that song out of which you can easily cobble together a title. "Girl From the Creature Feature"? "Slide It In"? Those would basically capture the feeling of the song, it's general sexual notions, but "Yippiyo-ay" takes that to the next level. That song is not about sex, it's about the nonsensical euphoria of communal night club experience. These guys aren't articulate, otherwise they might have been able to put something into words that was able to really express what's going on here. "Yippiyo-ay" is damn close though. Damn close.

But they do try to do something other than just put some nonsensical lyrics on top of brilliantly brooding and impeccably produced instrumentals. And "If I Know You" is a valiant effort. The only bad thing I can say about these songs is that they're so complete, frequency wise, it's really hard to mix them in with anything else. I don't think this is why David Lee Roth was talking about, but these songs will melt your records too.

Two Thousand Eight - 8. Max Tundra - Parallax Error Beheads You

Should I use this space to talk about how much I'm still obsessed with Mastered By Guy at the Exchange, roughly five years after I first heard it? I'll do my best not to.

As I wrote back in October, I think it was, I expected great things from Max Tundra's long awaited follow up. And yeah, he delivered. I didn't go through the roof when I heard it, but it would have been impossible to take the same colossal leap forward from album two to three that he made from one to two. That would have required a recalibration of the word "greatness".

Nobody wants to admit that there are limitations to how good something can be. Everyone wants to believe that the musicians they look up to can constantly be taking steps forward and that everything can be constantly getting better. Radiohead seems able to convince people that they're always capable of blowing the lid off the musical zeitgeist and getting fucking crazy and blowing everyone's mind, keeping hope alive for the myth of musical progress. With everyone else, you hope that they can make another good record.

Which Max Tundra has done. On merit alone, Parallax Error Beheads You is probably just as good as its predecessor. It has the same elements, it has songs that are really just as good as any on Guy, but inevitably it feels less original (I almost said less novel, which is also sort of true) and somehow more of its time than Guy, which still sounds totally and timelessly oddball. I could make the case that the record even holds together better than Guy does.

Fuck! This really is just me masturbating over Guy at the Exchange in a backhanded, 3 weeks into January year end list kind of way, isn't it? Pazz and Jop came out this week and I was all, what took you so long, but here I am only on number eight out of ten, and look how much trouble I'm having even coming with a good reasoning for why you should care about Parallax Error Beheads You.

It ought to be fucking easy. This is a fantastic record from a rare visionary that we should all be happy is still spending some of his time producing music, but it's extremely difficult for me to say why without falling back on a sui generis saying that it's a third Max Tundra record. It's a sui generis thing, or maybe an a priori thing. I was never good with Latin. Just watch the video, enjoy it as much as you possibly can, and let me go to sleep.

Two Thousand Eight - 9. Chromeo - Fancy Footwork

Do some people obviously and for some reason sort of wish it was still the 80’s? Obviously that’s a yes. Are some people musicians? Uh huh. Lots of records come out out of this demographic intersection, but Fancy Footwork takes an interesting approach to making it sound like the era of Members Only jackets.

Most bands with an 80s fetish are content to retread hyper trendy ground by packaging dated arrangements in more modern compression envelopes EQed in more bands than Duran Duran could have ever hoped to see in their lifetimes. The resulting listening experience from this sort of approach, a band in 2008 trying to sound like the 80s, isn't the same thing as actually listening to music from the 80s. Talk ‘til you’re blue in the face about how much Cut Copy sounds like New Order or how much the Presets sound like Depeche Mode, you can’t get around the fact that, despite obvious similarities, the records these bands put out this year sound very of their time. Whatever the 80s means in terms of a sound, it comes from a precise meeting of mixing boards, early digital technology, reverb/gate matchups, and other things that are far too specific and far too boring for most bands to care about them.

But Chromeo sidesteps that concern. Forget about the video homage to “Money For Nothing”, Chromeo is on something else even if they don’t know it. Call it reverse engineering. Chromeo seems to start with the feeling you get from a the 80s pop canon recording, or the particular euphoria of geeking out to a blaring freestyle jam, then they somehow remove the essence of the experience from immediate context of production or musical style. Of course, they usually add a lot of that style back, but the point is that they reconstruct the 80s sound largely out of non-musical or non-technological parts. The aim is a faithful recreation of what it feels like to hear 80s music, without actually hearing 80s music being a requirement.

So, you hear vocoders, which ought to trigger some sort of 80s synapse, but if you look a little closer, they use vocoders way more than anyone short of Afrika Bambaataa. It’s awesome because, beyond the fact that it’s goofy, it also makes you think you’re hearing an accurate approximation of what 80s music was like, while it’s actually something totally weird.

Chromeo did this on their first record, too, but to a much more limited degree, and not as skillfully. “Momma’s Boy” is the easiest thing to point to as the turning point. While they were always good at making you dance like you were hearing “Lucky Star” for the first time, Chromeo has also now somehow learned how to do Hall and Oates too! What the hell? And “Bonafide Lovin”? That “oh-uh-oh” bit on the chorus is straight I’m not even sure. It feels like it could be New Edition, but I wouldn’t even compare the two.

Basically, this is a great pop record. The lyrics (I fucking love “what you need is an older guy/With a little bit of life experience/The right clothes and the right appearance”. That’s timeless songcraft in action.) match the music, which matches a certain skin deep, yet very positive and universally applicable emotion. I tend to think 2008 was pretty terrible for pop music, but then I play this record and I’m all: “what am I so worried about?”

Two Thousand Eight - 10. Gang Gang Dance - Saint Dymphna

God's Money was a good record, which I liked, and, unfortunately, never really internalized. It's something of an experimental record, whatever that means: in this case it means that the songs are indistinct - the sense that they serve to create an album, more than they seek to be songs in and of themselves. It is a music album, not a group of songs, and needs to be appreciated in 40 minute bursts. Serious listeners have a chance at really getting this record, and everyone else maybe only catches glimpses of what it's about. I pretty much never listened to it seriously enough, but I could tell that there was some subtle stuff waiting in there for me when I had time for it.

Well, three years later, I still never made time and Gang Gang Dance came out with the perfect follow up record. This one has all the great stuff that made God's Money great and other stuff that makes Saint Dymphna even better. The main thing, though, is that this time around the band manages to create memorable songs within the context of a cohesive album. The off kilter loops, Brooklyn via Africa percussion (not the other way around), and magically not cliched atmospherics from the last album are still there but now there are hooks too.

If I ever pretend that I like listening to experimental music that doesn't have any hooks outside of a live context, you have the right to tell me I'm full of shit. Let's be honest - God's Money didn't have hooks enough to bring me back to it, even though I enjoyed it and knew it was a great record. I couldn't be more thankful that Gang Gang Dance wrote "House Jam" and "First Communion" because now I can like them unreservedly. They're now a band I can enjoy concretely, not in some assumed world of musical validity populated by vision without intent, innovation without soul. I guess this is how some people felt when Animal Collective released Sung Tongs. A band that showed perhaps an excess of enthusiasm and too little conception of their own strengths on their first record, made the sort of record they were meant to make on the second try.

Hooray!

Thing About 2007 In Arbitrary Order #4"Shreds" Videos

This one is at Some Trajectories.

Go here for it.

Thing About 2007 In Arbitrary Order #3Untrue By Burial, T-Pain

There is good reason to be skeptical when you hear someone talking about emotion in electronic music, even given the fact that most music, as time goes on, is and will continue to become more and more electronic. And this does not mean that I'm sanctioning writing out the entire idea of emotion in the realm of electronic music. Electronic music, like all music, is tied to emotion in a couple of ways at least, though in the case of electronic music the music itself rarely contains or expresses emotion, but rather that the experience of listening to the music, due largely due to circumstantial or extra-musical concerns, triggers emotions in the listener. Of course, this is a totally valid way for music to exist. All I'm saying is, when someone says, "[title of electronic composition] is so emotional," you may as well scoff cause 98% of the time you'll be right.

People like to talk about the Field apparently, but to me it sounds like every other micro house record I've ever heard. Cold, structural, boring, lifeless: entirely devoid of emotion. And sure, joy counts as an emotion, so Justice sort of counts as emotional, I wouldn't be able to counter that argument, but you have to admit that on a purely emotional level, The Cross is lacking something - even if it has joy locked down pretty well at times.

Which leaves Burial's Untrue relatively alone in this year's crop of "great" electronic records as "emotional". Are you skeptical? As I explained above, you should be. "Nothing's moved me since Music Has the Right To Children," you say, and if you say so you may well be right. Maybe there's no hope for you after all. But Untrue is good anyway and here's why.

Electronics when used in music can generally do two things: it can mask things, cover them up, or it can expose things. Amplification allows us to hear things we couldn't hear before - it exposes things. Modern studio production covers things up - it keeps us from clearly identifying the source of sound to the point where something like "Girl You Know It's True" can exist. And 2007 was anything, in terms of popular music (and I do not mean the music business), it was a real banner year for the ongoing battle between these two tendencies of electronics in music. But anyway, we were talking about Untrue.

The main selling point of Untrue is the way that Burial manages to wring emotional performances out of flat, ambiguous, spliced, unrecognizable and unintelligible vocal samples. The two best tracks on the album, and two of the best of the year, "Archangel" and "Etched Headplate" are the best examples of this. "Archangel" takes what are likely sampled pieces of three of four anonymous performances (or, I assume, anonymous to any but the most diehard record crate diggers) and transforms them into a fucking haunting vocal line, without retaining most of the words in any of the samples, or even the original pitch or line of any of the samples. "Etched Headplate" does something similar, though seemingly with material from the same song - cutting, editing between phrases and messing around severly with pitch and phrasing. What comes out in both of these tracks are unforgettable and, yes, emotional vocal performances created from totally forgettable and flat original source material.

And, like Jay Dee did on Donuts last year, Burial often does this while removing superfluous elements from the vocal performances he samples. At heart Untrue and Donuts are instrumental albums, not only because they were largely created on electronic musical instruments, but also because vocal performances on them are largely stripped of linguistic meaning, or even linguistic nonsense. The result is, I guess you could say, something akin to dadaist poetry - but I wouldn't say that. I'd say it's more akin to good instrumental music. Burial frees his sampled vocal performers from the constraints of the words they were trying to say.

And here we can get back to what I was saying before. Untrue reveals through electronic manipulation something about music that otherwise would be locked away in words, logic and a conscious effort to convey meaning in a traditional way. Most electronic music deals with apparent emotion, or potential emotion, Burial gets at actual emotion, and he does so by using the very tools that are meant to cover up - pitch shifting, reverb, digital editing.

But here's the battle for electronic music is fighting an underground war, a losing battle. Burial has created great music, but, of his own volition, will not take the fight to the masses. Our real hero here is T-Pain. If things get really weird we might look back on 2007 as the year that the auto-tuner went from being a studio trick to being a musical instrument.

Where Burial makes the subtle point that electronics can free us from bullshit as much as they can cause it, T-Pain takes a machine meant to fool pre-teens into thinking Billy Ray Cyrus's daughter can sing and turns it into an artistic tool. Holy Shit! Here we have the real maverick, the real danger to the industry. Stop that odd looking guy with flourescent dread locks!

One great thing electronic music has been able to do is take human process, actions, sounds and recontextualize them.

Thing About 2007 In Arbitrary Order #2"Curses" by Future of the Left

Mclusky broke up in 2005. Future of the Left released their first album in 2007. Really, two years? I was kind of deathly afraid that Andrew Falkous wouldn't ever put out any more material worth listening to, so two years really wasn't very long to wait.

Sometimes I have to treat music releases with reverence. I'd venture that this might be one of the starkest generational hallmarks of the age. Not to get to far into it, but kids, even kids born like a year after me, are so used to downloading music and having music that the idea of anticipation, of self restraint, of waiting to hear music, is becoming a lost idea. I'd fallen out of touch with what post Mclusky machinations were amounting to. I'd heard that Future of the Left had formed, and at the time had searched half heartedly for some tracks on Soulseek, coming up with only a couple of songs buried deep in some cavernous queues that I never was able to delve into. So, I was surprised when "Curses" came out; I didn't actively long for it or anticipate it. I did not count the days, or wait outside the record store or even go over on my lunch break to purchase it (though if I found it on vinyl I'd still gladly pay for it). Nope, I download it like everything and everyone else the day after it was reviewed on Pitchfork.

There was no reverence. There of course was no fucking reverence to Future of the Left. Would that they had it so easy.

With a couple of exceptions "Curses" is the only album released this year that's worth listening to. David Lee Roth, who by the way is awesome watch these videos if you don't believe me

David Lee Roth Video One

David Lee Roth Video Two

once said that if you bought a Van Halen album and put it in your collection with the rest of your vinyl, all your other records would melt. Computers and iPods make that comment irrelevant to "Curses" but it's as close to the same thing as you can get. It will melt something if you put it somewhere, maybe not quite so much as "Do Dallas" but as close as you can get.

I've mentioned it before, but it's worth repeating that Andrew Falkous is remarkable not for being a snarky cynical asshole but for being a snarky cynical asshole who writes about the banalities and uglinesses of human life with such compassion. It's sort of about cartharsis, but, as usual, that's a relatively shallow way to look at it. Saying "violence solved everything" is juvenile out of context, but who's to say what the context of "The Lord Hates a Coward" is, really? As despicable a statement it might be, Falkous invites you to identify with someone, like him, I guess, who would say such a thing with such conviction. Rather than giving release to your emotional impulses, it validates the darker impulses, confirms the darker thoughts that you file away all day as you sit behind your desk. The joy of "Curses", and the joy of Falkous's writing in general, is this confirmation. Not an ecstasy of release but an ecstasy of ultimate inclusion.

Anyone knows that inclusive groups quickly become exclusive, but Falkous offers a picture of humanity so fucked that, who cares? I hate you, you hate me, I hate me, sometimes, gee whiz if we aren't all human in the first place. And separate this please from the "punk" ideal of nihilistic self and other hatred - the Sex Pistols syndrome, the Richard Hell "I'd kill myself if I could get up the nerve" shit my pants pussyfutting around believing in anything. Falkous's speakers have obviously believed, and often still do, in something if only the idea that life is worth living just because. The joy of making fun of others, for one.

Here's one of the best lines:

"Make a living by contract bridge. Boring and magnificent. Surely you're amazed by it. Suddenly these processes do not seem significant. Now we are not worthy of friends."

And what it comes down to is how can I hear that and not say, "Christ he has me pinned the fuck down all over again."

Thing About 2007 In Arbitrary Order #1Michael Cera / Judd Apatow

Going into 2007 it was pretty clear that Michael Cera was awesome, but there wasn't much proof. Arrested Development of course is one of the few watchable TV comedies of the past decade largely because of him, but man is that a hard thing to back up. He had the odd position of being the acknowledged secret weapon of a very talented cast in a very well written show. Who could tell for sure if it was him, the part, or the company he kept? Assholes like John Heder (excuse me if that's not his name) are constantly outed as one trick ponies, and given what little there was to go on, Michael Cera could easily have been the next Napoleon Dynamite.Instead, he's awesome. Not that you can't argue that he's still a one trick pony, but you also can't argue that he isn't 19 and that he has had the good luck to somehow appear in both one of the best television comedies in recent memory and one of the best cinematic comedies in recent memory within a few short years.

Enough! An enigmatic, skinny an unassuming comedic voice must be had! Even if Michael Cera turns out to be a hack, which I don't think has a chance of happening, he still gives us hope that earnest, clever comedy has not been totally pushed off the map by Scrubs. Hope! Youth! Michael Cera embodies all that can still be good about Hollywood, and he reminds us that not everyone is irredeemable, even in California. He's Canadian, too.

Maybe even more than Michael Cera, though, it's Judd Apatow that gives us hope. I'm sure Michael Cera has some bad, even terrible movies in him, and seeing as he'll probably only do a couple a year, it would seem that he's not going to save the world. Judd Apatow, though, has somehow become a sort of a Brian Eno figure (I realize this is a less than insightful analogy) who, by attracting talent and having taste, has managed to transform the landscape of comedy in film in a very short period of time. And, like Eno, he has a style, but no one is exactly sure where he comes in in the creative process on any given piece of work. He's done movies as different as Anchorman and Knocked Up and somehow they've all been good. All of them! Like, actually, all of them. Has anyone, ever been involved with 5 comedic films in a row as consistently good and funny as Anchorman, The Forty Year Old Virgin, Talladega Nights (ok...), Knocked Up, and Superbad?

I hate to get too personal with this, but I saw Superbad twice in theaters, within the first two weeks after it was released. I'm pretty sure that this has never before happened in my life, except, perhaps, and slightly embarrassingly, for Waterworld. Though I doubt it, I think Waterworld had been out for a while by the time I saw it the second time. This fact, in itself, is enough to make Michael Cera and Judd Apatow worthy of note.

Basically, the point is, when was the last time you saw a funny movie that Judd Apatow was not involved in? When was the last time you wanted to go to a movie theater to see a comedy that Judd Apatow was not involved in? Probably it wasn't this year. I dare you to name a comedy that was actually worth seeing this year that didn't have his name on it somewhere. Ratatouille doesn't count. And neither does The Ten cause Paul Rudd was in it.Get excited about comedy god damn it. That's why this is worth thinking about. There is reason to be excited about comedic film again.