Halftime lists

Here's some cursory halftime top 10s for music and film, with brief notes:

Film

(still have yet to catch a bunch of stuff: Winter's Bone and Dogtooth are the most egregious omissions)

From previous years, released this one (minimum standard: one week run in NYC)
The Father of My Children
The only title on here that isn't a straggler from last year's NYFF, which is kind of sad. It's pretty clear to me that Mia Hansen-Løve is soon going to be capable of pulling off just about anything she wants to; All Is Forgiven is slightly preferable (it's more tough-minded in ways that resonate with me), but certainly didn't prepare me for the first half of this, which performs the far-from-negligible feat of rewriting Irma Vep as a slowly unraveling and increasingly dysphoric downward spiral — and let's not even talk about the back half, which (among other things) features one of the more remarkable teen-post-morning-after scenes in recent memory. As in All Is Forgiven, this is a film of two opposed halves, but that film elided the central event (rehab); this places it dead center but renders it completely elusive.

That said, Olivier Assayas' jukebox is more fun than his fiance's.

Sweetgrass and Ghost Town I wrote about here

Wild Grass I'm just gonna copy and past my capsules from last year's viewings to save time. I need to take a break from this movie and come back to it eventually:

1st viewing an exuberant, disorienting experience, as odd as Punch-Drunk Love (odder, really, since it's not psychologically coherent, but the colors have the same pop) and, at heart, as morbidly playful as Synecdoche, New York without the overwhelming despair. It's manic-depressive even as it's energetic, making it clear very early on how truly deranged these characters are and hinting at far worse; is Andre Dussolier a rapist? What's his dark past? (As in Private Fears in Public Places, whether Dussolier lives with his wife or daughter is left alarmingly unclear for a while.) Resnais seems to have been watching Gondry as well — there's one virtuoso, impossible trick-shot collapsing time with the help of hand-held shakiness — and impossibly inventive. Exhilarating, and seemingly infinitely self-referential: one of the final tracking shots past rows of gardens seems to invoke Night And Fog, while three smoking/no smoking posters behind Mathieu Amalric's head at the police station summon up, well, Smoking/No Smoking. (Surely there's more I'm missing.) Pretty much inarguably a major film, far from a minor final dispatch. This is not a late auteur work that needs apologies made for it.

2nd viewing, basically I realized the whole thing's suffused in death and morbidity. I'll return to this.

Everyone Else: another NYFF capsule, as follows:

My one serious objection to this movie is that it's a bit Mars/Venus-y: guys want to go hiking, girls want to go on picnics; guys want to stay home and drink in the privacy of the living room, girls want to go to the club and dance dance dance. Those are legitimate bones to pick, but this film is both general and specific, while also maintaining depicting intensely awkward and miserable circumstances in a way that's just barely on the right side of dark comedy, a serious achievement. The film's main limitation is self-imposed — like mumblecore, it's fiercely introverted, shutting out the outside world, but that speaks to the intensity of the relationship as unwisely self-contained universe. Perfectly, subtly acted; a huge leap from The Forest For The Trees. [In retrospect, I'm not sure if I should've laughed as much as I did. I will note that a good friend who's roughly 70% taste compatible with me film-wise called a few months ago after this finally reached Omaha and said he thought it was the best movie since Synecdoche, which was the best movie since Zodiac. My admiration for this film is not on that level of magnitude.]

From this year, more or less ranked:
Greenberg — an absolute lay-up, given my taste and perfect sympathy for abrasively self-blocking dudes who are their own worst enemy. (Ahem. Sometimes, though I'm not nearly that bad these days.) Plus Baumbach's sensibility (at least dating back to The Squid And The Whale — have yet to investigate the first half of his career) is very much in line with mine — I dig all those articulately self-loathing train-wrecks — so I actually dragged myself to see this at like 10 on a Thursday night two days after getting back to town after SXSW, because I just couldn't wait. Some more capsule/bullet-point stuff:

a) Some kind of a breakthrough for Baumbach; if it's not as tightly realized as The Squid and the Whale, it also offers a surprising detour from the increasingly ratcheted-up nastiness Margot At The Wedding suggested Baumbach would keep upping to unsustainable levels. Squid/Margot deal with protagonists in the process of actively scarring and damaging those around them; in Greenberg, the damage is long gone and past, which makes Greenberg a peculiarly empathetic character. Yes, he does damage to Greta Gerwig — but she's in just enough of a twenty-something funk that she's too old to get seriously wounded, while too young to really take care of herself. She'll learn.

b) Baumbach in widescreen for (I believe) the first time, which frees him up; the handheld camera has been toned down and the shots are casually sunny and expansive. It's a true LA movie, and that includes the little touches: I especially liked Gerwig's friend at the bar. Her sneering disbelief when Greenberg says he doesn't drive — "You don't drive? Have you ever driven?" — suggests the bottomless arrogance of the worst kind of Angeleno, and I absolutely recognize it.

c) Given that we spend the first 15 minutes with Gerwig, it could just as easily be called Florence; if Roger's our true subject, that's because he wears himself down enough over the course of the film to emerge at a moment where he has at least a fighting shot of beginning to fix himself, while Florence remains unchanging, for better or worse. Sporadic feminist outrage has erupted over Greenberg's treatment of Florence, as if the film were endorsing masculine dickheadedness, which is very misguided indeed; these kinds of fatally unbalanced relationships are certainly not uncommon, and thinking the movie endorses it is just nuts.

d) For all the advance word of how incredibly unpleasant everyone on screen is, this is the most easily digestible film Baumbach's made since his hiatus; much of it is quotable without context ("Leonard Maltin would give me two-and-a-half stars"), the laughs are timed evenly and the whole thing seems less designed to make you squirm. I really like this movie, so much so I don't trust myself.

Cold Weather and Putty Hill I wrote about here, and Audrey The Trainwreck was addressed here; the latter's absolute neglect on the festival circuit (unless I missed something), not to mention lack of distribution, is an absolute fucking disgrace. This is a major breakthrough film.

And Everything Is Going Fine was addressed here and is apparently due for direct-to-DVD release by Magnolia next year, which is too bad. It's my favorite Soderbergh since, I dunno, Bubble. But I'm also a morbid DFW fan, which undoubtedly plays into it.

I didn't have a chance to write about Michael Madsen's Into Eternity for various reasons, which is a shame. Briefly: this is the most formally pleasurable documentary since probably Workingman's Death (not least because it's shot on 35mm!). I'm not the kind of guy who cares particularly about social issues, so a tract about nuclear waste disposal isn't necessarily an obvious thing for me to dig, but Madsen approaches his subject in a way that's orderly, playful and gorgeous; he cops some moves from Errol Morris (one shot is pretty much directly lifted from Standard Operating Procedure) but also has a voice of his own. (The finale — a crane into the darkness of the cave with Sibelius blaring — is a boldly expressionistic gambit that pays off in impact as much as in the pleasurable shock of its sheer gutsiness.) The parts of Madsen delivering speeches timed to a match burning out are so Lynch-y they have to be a joke, and it's a good one. I hope this gets distribution; it deserves it. If you're going to make people care about depressing things, this is the way to do it.

And c'mon, how blessed is he with that name? Jeez.

Music

A really great year so far, though I'm a little behind; the left channel of my trusty speakers has fallen silent, and I can't afford new ones for a bit (unexpected moving expenses have wiped me out a bit). I suspect that Wild Nothing album is right up my alley, but we won't know for a bit yet. (Other notable listening omissions I'll catch up to eventually: Drake, Janelle Monae, Ariel Pink, Rhymefest.) That said, let's do this:

Albums

1. The National, High Violet — addressed here earlier this year. Not much has changed since then; I'm at 43 listens and counting. "The Runaway" is a little bit of a drag (I prefer the more stripped-down live-in-the-radio-station version from last year), but there's really not a weak song in the bunch, and "Bloodbuzz Ohio" is clearly some seriously life-affirming, spine-chilling shit. More than anything else, The National understand the precise weight and texture of banal depression, the stuff of workaday slogging; they're also frighteningly talented musicians who understand how to make brass arrangements carry emotional weight. Every day I wake up and say a little prayer that Matt Berninger's drinking won't get too out of hand.

2. Spoon, Transference — addressed here. Spoon are part of my life in a big way; I'm an Austin kid and, as Britt Daniel once sang, "I have your blood inside my heart." I put this on ice for a few months, but I'm listening to it again right now and it really is as fully-fledged a statement as they've ever crafted. My friend Andrew Unterberger thinks Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is basically an overly-slick exhibition of staid craftsmanship, which is nuts — but I see what he's saying, and Transference pushes the boundaries in a way that makes that album's immaculate craftsmanship look sterile.

3. Teenage Fanclub, Shadows — just when you thought this list couldn't get any whiter or blander...look. I'm as surprised as the next guy at how much I like this. I don't really know much about the Fanclub, although that'll probably change soon; I listened to Bandwagonesque quite a bit in high school (it's pretty much mandatory entry-level listening for anyone interested in '90s Scotrock), but it was a little too #1 Record for me (I'm more of a Third/Sister Lovers guy), and nothing on there is nearly as good as "Alcoholiday." Then I missed everything until Man-Made came out a few years ago, and frankly that album's a drag: the clean, Tortoise-inspired production does them no favors.

I guess Shadows isn't a terribly "relevant" album; the fact that Fanclub are still with us should theoretically be no more interesting than, say, the fact that the Trash Can Sinatras are still doing work. But this is one heinously well-crafted album, with so many highlights I've basically been fixating on two or three songs at a time and picking them apart. "Baby Lee" was my first obsession — those downward thirds on the chorus are really something else — but the fugal last two minutes on "The Fall" are out of this world, and I appreciate how "Sweet Days Waiting" flat-out steals the verse from The Beach Boys' "Forever." Some of the lines are good — "modern life corrodes us all, you know that it's true" is a nice bit — and there's a lot to love here if you love pop craftsmanship. And if I tell you I spent a hefty chunk of last year listening to Jellyfish on repeat, I guess you'll understand where I'm coming from.

4. These New Puritans, Beat Pyramid — I liked These New Puritans' first album just fine -- it had a nicely spazzy committment to being annoying -- but nothing about it suggested they were anything more than waspish provacteurs, using stupid tinny keyboards and nonsense lyrics to mock and destroy the sonic zeitgeist of amateurish dance music for indie kids. Beat Pyramid opens with two minutes of a woodwind suite (!), followed by "We Want War," which is one of the most staggering things I've heard in a while (and certainly one of the few songs that could be deemed "original"). "Beat Pyramid" wouldn't be a bad name for it, given that when the backwards-singing choir (or whatever the hell that is) kicks in at 3:50, the band isn't even getting started. It's like, what is this thing? There's some joker with a deep voice laughing; it should be cheesy, like a half-assed Joker calling card, but it's kind of chilling. The arrangement just gets more and more brass-atrophied as it goes along; it has the structural depth and fugal structure most motets would kill for, and the song's basically unprecedented. Most bands who cite classical composers as inspiration stick to Steve Reich, Erik Satie and the like; TNP cite Benjamin Britten, and I'm inclined to believe them. The rest of the album is perfectly fine, although it couldn't possibly live up to that. Most reviews have been on the "respect > love" side, which is understandable (if lazy in a universe where I have to deal with drooling Animal Collective fanboys), though it's more like it's impossible to get any work done while listening to it.

5. Broken Bells, Broken Bells — Heard the unmastered leak first, then the real thing; rarely has what mastering can do been so clear, as this is almost certainly one of the best-sounding records of the year, and for a while I just listened to it on that level. Then the songs started popping out at me as well. I love the supremely casual amble of the intro: the first 25 seconds don't really do anything but lope from some synth blurts into another typically meticulous James Mercer composition, almost as if by accident. I think (oddly enough, all things considered) working with Danger Mouse has actually loosened Mercer up; he even attempts (and pulls off!) a falsetto on "The Ghost Inside."

The other thing to note is that this is a staggeringly grim album; Mercer was never exactly a cheerleader, but here he's going on about all kinds of tiny apocalypses. (Song titles: "Your Head Is On Fire," "Sailing To Nowhere," "The Mall & Misery.") And if you watch the video for "The High Road," it's clear the newly matured Mercer -- boyish the last time I saw them live, now gray, grizzled and looking like some kind of '70s B-movie bar extra -- has suffered god knows what in the process of breaking up The Shins; he looks grizzled and pissed-off. Regardless, this is a terrific, crafty record, and a welcome comeback from a guy who didn't initially seem like a lifer but now seems to be getting comfortable with it.

6. Beach House, Teen Dream — impressive as hell, though for some reason I don't love this the same way I did Devotion. I will say that the fact that they had much more to say than their first album indicated is very unexpected and pleasing.

7. Local Natives, Gorilla Manor — a mixed bag, insofar as Local Natives are practicing a very low-stakes, almost generic kind of indie rock (and the lyrics mostly suck). But I increasingly appreciate what they accomplish inside those limitations: "Camera Talk" is a hell of a song (even if it's basically just a stupid tribute to taking Facebook pictures), and the way they cover Talking Heads' "Warning Sign" (i.e., turning it into the three-part folk rock David Byrne deliberately was destroying) is smart and impressive. Room for growth here for sure.

8. Let's Wrestle, In The Court Of The Wrestling Let's — Like Cymbals Eat Guitars, the amiable gentlemen of Let's Wrestle appear firmly convinced that the best music ever was college radio about 1995, and I'm certainly not gonna argue with them; I love that shit. The lyrics are clever ("My friends are in prison and that's where I want to go because I hate everyone") and darkly but comically morose ("They said if you want to help just kill yourself, but I won't do that"), the guitars are crunchy, the chord changes work, and the songs are short. Rock on bros; Built To Spill this ain't, but it's more fun than anything those guys have done lately.

9. Charlotte Gainsbourg, IRM — not to take anything away from the lustrous Ms. Gainsbourg, but this is the best thing Beck's done in years (probably since The Information, which I dig, although his recent Record Club covers projects have definitely yielded some unexpected gems). Best bits: the dramatic strings of "Time of the Asassins" (could be slapped onto a '70s movie's opening credits with no questions asked), the playfully ominous rumble of "Le Chat Du Café Des Artistes" and the totally bouncy "Heaven Can Wait" duet.

10. Vampire Weekend, Contra — this should probably be higher up on the list, but I'm too lazy to redo the numbers. That VW could write excellent pop songs we already knew; that they'd up their game so quickly and throw in all kinds of extra fillips, arrangements and ambitions is a big surprise. This is ambitious music; the casual aura's deceptive.

Songs not factored above

Sleigh Bells, "Rill Rill" — I will get around eventually to properly considering all of Treats, which definitely seems like a year-end contender; this is the rare album that uses noise and distortion not to rock but as legitimate tools to construct sugary pop. (Rarely has an album so potentially abrasive seemed this much fun.) But first I'll have to get over the staggering greatness of "Rill Rill," a song that's the closest thing I've heard to The Soft Bulletin in the last 11 years. There's two pulsing beats, then the full-on assault of Funkadelic piano sample, bells and all kinds of other frills; like Dave Fridmann's work on that album (especially "Waitin' For A Superman"), the gap between the storm and the calm at the center creates a powerful sonic chasm. This is basically a song about a stupid Brooklyn girl running around on a typical weekend night — showing off her tattoos, cutting lines in the bathroom, celebrating facile girl power — but I could care less.

...we're at 3,000 + words. I'm gonna stop here for now.

Positive things I have written in the last year

There is something very depressing about being told you're relentlessly negative. Here is an incomplete list of stuff that's either effusive or damn-near-close-to I wrote in the last year to prove I'm not Dale Peck. This bothers me; this last stands here for future ref.

Fantastic Mr. Fox review

about Jim Finn

regarding Ulrich Seidl

Reviews of Rolling Thunder and The Outside Man

Harmony and Me review

enthusiastic NYFF endorsements of Sweetgrass,
Ghost Town and To Die Like A Man

effusive praise for the True/False film festival, and many of the films I saw there

praise for Putty Hill, Mars and Cold Weather (and, later, Audrey The Trainwreck and Beijing Taxi)

Plus posts below gushing over mumblecore, The National and Spoon and a book review that got an A- and innumerable blog posts

A brief taxonomy of mumblecore.

This is mostly done because various tweeps have been slagging on THE VOICE OF MY GENERATION. There will be no citations or links; I'm just going to spout off.

About the word itself: Yes, it's an annoying label, coined as a late-night bar-grumble, adopted reflexively by a press that always functions better when something can be reduced to a neologism. And yes, it sucked for filmmakers who had to answer to it (or to people's perceptions of it). Nonetheless, it'd be silly to deny that so many filmmakers who work with/act for each other's films and circle the same demographic relentlessly don't have some commonalities. It's also equally stupid not to acknowledge that this was, at most, a five-year boom; all the instigators are now spiraling out into different directions.

Not Mumblecore
John Cassavetes: Cassavetes has precisely zero relationship to "mumblecore," but he kept getting invoked; the link, presumably, was one of a new breakthrough in "screen realism," which is a) a misunderstanding of the oft-theatrical/operatic nature of Cassavetes' performances b) stupid. The key link — one I saw Dan Sallitt make somewhere or other — has to do with changing definitions of what constitutes "realism" on-screen.

David Gordon Green: Cited by Matt Dentler as the godfather of the genre, seeing as people in George Washington and All The Real Girls do, in fact, mumble a lot — but Green's a lush 35mm stylist, so the comparison really doesn't go anywhere very fast. It is true that DGG is a graduate of NCSA, which also produced people like Aaron Katz, but that doesn't really mean much. If Green is mumblecore, then so is Judd Apatow.

Mumblecore
Andrew Bujalski
Personal history: I'm pretty sure Bujalski brought Funny Ha Ha to Austin in 2003, when he was taking it around the country personally; I saw it in the ad hoc screening room at the back of a coffee shop, which seems about right. Never before had I seen passive-aggressive non-communication depicted with such acuity. I was sold. Subsequently, I interviewed Bujalski after the release of all three of his movies.

Stylistic hallmarks: Bujalski's aesthetic is (up to this point) based solely upon the unusual fact that he actually uses film and grain, which he loves. As the instigator and so forth, Bujalski's films are the most opaque, even if they seem to have a clear surface. In Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation and Beeswax, Bujalski sympathetically anatomizes failures of nerve and communication without excusing them. To say that they're about white post-collegiate grads drifting directionlessly through life is like saying Cassavetes movies are about raging alcoholics who yell a lot; it's a deliberately obtuse description. (To the extent that they're about the same group of people over and over, they're not self-congratulation; they're generationally specific variations on the same failures rather than celebration of same.) If Funny Ha Ha belies its title (it's a tough watch), both Mutual Appreciation and Beeswax are increasingly Stillman-esque comedies laying bare the unofficial rules of social interaction of a generation of kids trained to be polite and self-effacing as a response to an increasingly loud, boorish and self-congratulatory society. (And don't even start with the hipster crap. When he makes a movie about kids taking acid, hooking up in gay clubs and smoking out on rooftops under the heat of the Brooklyn sun, then we'll talk.)

Criticisms: Early booster Ray Carney has (reportedly) turned on Bujalski for failing to take the brave emotional chances and conflicts of Cassavetes, which I think is code for "this isn't realism if people aren't screaming/being emotionally brave." He should know better.

Joe Swanberg
Personal history: I've seen LOL, Hannah Takes The Stairs and Alexander The Last. One time at a SXSW party he asked me if I'd seen his wife. Considering I'd never met either of them, that struck me as odd. I'm friendly with C. Mason Wells, his collaborator on LOL.

Stylistic hallmarks: Almost certainly the most divisive filmmaker of the cluster, Swanberg's films are the antidote for people who find Bujalski unrealistically neutered and sexless (which he's not, but some people seem incapable of crediting the reality of anything they haven't personally experienced). There are a lot of sex scenes in his work, and I personally find them fairly unproductive; some of them (like the cutting back and forth between rehearsal sex and the real thing in Alexander) are pretty much on the level of freshman creative writing class thinking.

Swanberg has been accused — justifiably — of complete visual indifference, though with Alexander he seems to have discovered framing, lighting, etc. His work up to now has been characterized by an absolute focus on performances (lots of erratic zooming in and out for emphasis) rather than visuals, to an extent that's kind of visually unprecedented for movies that receive distribution, are seen by people that aren't the filmmaker's friends, etc.

Criticisms: Besides that the movies look terrible and have too many sex scenes? That they privilege narcissism — which is kind of true. My favorite of the three films I've seen is LOL, a supremely accurate depiction of a group of people I absolutely recognize and would run a mile in tight shoes to avoid. There's, nonetheless, something hard to dismiss about his work; the sheer fact that it irritates (rather than just bores) me suggests something.

Aaron Katz
Personal history: I've met Aaron a few times while he lived in Brooklyn. He's an exceptionally quiet dude and I have exchanged maybe 150 words with him in my lifetime. Also I drunkenly geeked out on him after seeing Cold Weather. Also I'm friends with the good folks of Benten Films, who put his first two films out on DVD. Consider my critical objectivity fatally compromised.

Stylistic hallmarks: The unapologetically rarified aesthete of the group, Katz's movies rarely look less than stunning. Stylistically and thematically, they're all completely different creatures. Dance Party USA is sort of like a Larry Clark movie without the hypocritical mixture of puritanism and lechery: it dares to consider the fallout of a rape without losing its nerve. It's also sensitive about setting up spaces where teen boys and girls can talk among themselves; I generally think it's terrific. Quiet City is also a dazzling movie — the near avant-garde interludes, dreamily abstracting the passing subway view into creamy colors, lines and dots — but everyone in it frankly pisses me off. If you want to talk about a movie that's reflexively coy, inarticulate and asexual, well...yeah. But that's just me.

Cold Weather is a whole other beast, and a very good argument for why no one should ever use the word "mumblecore" in 2010: it could (and hopefully will) be a crossover hit. It's the kind of mainstream-ish comedy that could've been slipped under the radar in the late '70s/early '80s as an inexpensive studio film (by Joan Micklin Silver, say), and it's absolutely "written" in every sense of the word.

Criticisms: I'm pretty sure everyone likes this guy. Pass.

The Duplass Brothers
Personal history: I saw The Puffy Chair in Austin with a friend who's about as good-ol-boy/frat/blond/football booster as they come, a man who spent much of his time at NYU drinking straight whiskey and generating all of his income through sports betting. He had, as a matter of fact, dug Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation while intensely disliking all of the people in it (see, it's possible! This isn't just about circle jerk clique-ishness and self-congratulation), but noted after Puffy Chair "That was like Funny Ha Ha for my people." This was absolutely correct. I also ended up seeing Baghead in Austin; I have yet to see Cyrus.

Stylistic hallmarks: The Duplass brothers have a strong interest in maintaining a traditional three-act structure (or five, depending on how you feel about it); their films have openings, middles and resolutions, along with beats. Like Noah Baumbach — who edits the hell out of his work to cover, quite successfully, its relative structural conventionality — their handheld cameras, fondness for spontaneous, out-of-nowhere jokes and superficially roughshod surface covers this off. They're the most overtly jockish, which is a good thing; the word "dude" is probably abused in Puffy Chair as many times as "fuck" is in The Big Lebowski. What they're doing is tricky — Baghead is so meta about its genre-tweaking game it devours itself in the last twenty minutes — but insanely ambitious.

Criticisms: General sloppiness and inchoateness. YMMV.

Kentucker Audley
Personal history: I interviewed Mr. Audley (nee Andrew Nenninger) for the release of Team Picture and met him at a few parties afterwards. He sent me his two latest films, and I really should sit down and watch them.

Stylistic hallmarks: Team Picture is supremely casual, a slacker comedy shot with an artlessness so deliberate it's almost, I dunno, Cukor-esque (better analogies welcome); if you think he's making a lazy movie about lazy people, you're not paying attention. I find it consistently hilarious. I don't really know what else to say, honestly; it's a pure comedy, unless you don't think it's funny. It is notable, I guess, that Team Picture is distinctively "southern" (i.e., based in Memphis) and proudly regional (it's kind of amazing how Bujalski has shot movies in three different cities while studiously avoiding showing any of the geography; he's more after a mental state of mind that can't be pinned down that easily).

Criticisms: Eh. Hold.

*********

I'm not about to start talking about post-mumblecore stuff (Medicine For Melancholy, You Wont Miss Me et al.), mostly because a) they're so thematically/stylistically differentiated it should be obvious (and if you don't believe me, try to get your hands on Frank V. Ross' Audrey The Trainwreck, which cops a lot of moves from Desplechin and Assayas, which is some kind of Amerindie first) b) I'm getting tired. Hopefully I've demonstrated some stuff about the differences between this allegedly monolithic group of of filmmakers.

Three things to refute while I'm making my way out the door:
a) Where are the minorities? Look, I know we live in a post-racial, post-Obama world (note: I am not remotely serious), but this seems like a problem about how we don't live in a post-racial world. For serious.

b) It's always about whiny 20somethings. Well: OK, you fund their shit then. Do you honestly believe that this group of filmmakers are so solipsistic, so infinitely self-regressive they just want to produce the cinematic equivalent of roman-a-clefs indefinitely? Reading interviews with all of them will review an enviable cinephilia much better informed than their big-budget confreres; it's not like they're unaware of the possibilities. But: you want to make a movie. You have almost no money. You have friends who can work with you. I mean Come. On.

c) Only the people the movies are about can relate to the movies. Sure, and only waifish Marxist gamines watch '60s Godard.

[update: d.) "I don't get the point of mumblecore," tweeted friend of the blog and all-round good guy THE FUTURIST! And yet I know for a fact that he's expressed his appreciation for Mutual Appreciation and Dance Party USA, while disliking other "mumblecore" films. Point being it's like saying "I dislike Godard and Rivette; what's the point of the French New Wave?" Not even all the filmmakers like each other; you're not obligated to either.]

"The Karate Kid" liveblog

Never seen the original Karate Kid; today it's raining and miserable and I don't feel like trekking through the bullshit (and Puerto Rico Day!) to get to Winter's Bone. So retraoctive nostalgia, today you're my bitch (or, more accurately, I'm yours). Let's do this. For the record, I've never seen Rocky or any of John G. Avildsen's other fine films; I did, as a kid, inexplicably read the novelization of The Karate Kid Part II a number of times, and I also saw The Next Karate Kid, which even as an eight-year-old I knew was dreadful. So that's my background. Let's do this.

0:37: "Newark, New Jersey - September." Not the most prepossessing opening, is it?

1:57: I find it difficult to believe any sane person would object to leaving Newark and moving elsewhere — especially California, I mean c'mon. Those opening shots are depressing.

2:53: I guess it's kind of bold to start with the road trip move itself rather than setting up home, the leaving, the trauma, etc. However: Bill Conti's blaring Copland trumpets are way too overstated, the landscape is scrubby and uninspiring and how the hell did they move their entire lives in one car? Are they dead broke or what?

3:46:: Ah, palm trees. So I take it we're in California now.

4:57: I don't want to be mean or anything, but Daniel's mom seems like a real weirdo. That Noo Yawk accent is way over the top. Actually, I have to take that back: Wikipedia says Randee Heller really was from Brooklyn, and also played Rizzo in Grease on Broadway, which actually makes a lot of sense. Meanwhile, Macchio's bitching about how he enjoys New York winters. Miserable bastard.

6:28: I dig the neighbor kid Freddy; he seems nice enough. When you get Macchio to talk, his macho posturing about how he can kick ass with karate is actually kind of realistic and endearing. First thing that's rung true so far.

7:49: This whole "New Jerseyites in exile and pining for a return home" thing is kind of hilarious. Macchio's relationship with his mom is honestly kind of sweet. This is starting to pick up.

8:30: Miyagi already introduced, which is efficiency. Downside: he just caught a fly with some chopsticks. Is this movie consistently heavy on the stereotypes, or just sporadically?

9:32: That's one dirty fucking beach. (Which is consistent with my experience of LA, admittedly.) The Jan & Dean song is kind of fun though.

10:20: At the end of the beach scene, the slo-mo dissolve out is one of those after-the-fact slowdowns. The effect is oddly Wong Kar-Wai.

11:32: William Zabka has arrived. This shit just turned into The Wild Bunch. Too bad, it was actually kind of authentic-seeming for a bit.

14:33: I mean, Daniel definitely just got his ass handed to him on a platter and that's humiliating, but for the kids to just walk away from him seems a little mean. We all have our off nights, no? And It's not like they were doing anything.

15:55: So Daniel's wearing sunglasses (inside, at breakfast) to cover up the black eyes from the fight. His mom demands he take them off: "Are you on something? What are you hiding?" Nancy Reagan's America for sure, even though he tries to banter his way out of it.

16:20: This.

17:07: Daniel's new high school has a plaque from the Native Sons of the Golden West. I.e., these guys. From their website: "as was normative for many of its counterpart organizations in times gone by, for a number of decades, the Native Sons was heavily dominated by a tone of Anglo-Saxon Americanism that included some exclusionary membership policies. As time has progressed, those policies have long since been succeeded by forward-looking, all-embracing ones. So today, the Native Sons membership encompasses people from all ethnic segments that characterize the richly diverse general population of California." Grand.

18:16: Despite the fact that Elizabeth Shue obviously wants to bang him, Macchio still can't get any respect. What the hell.

19:43: Jeez, Shue's a cheerleader? I guess this is back when those could be protagonists without being mocked. Not anymore though, right?

21:54:: He pays for her public school lunch! How chivalrous.

23:31: Pretty much the first thing we learn about Kreese is that he's a Vietnam vet, which a) explains why he's a psychopath b) why Zabka's an asshole. That's some serious shorthand and stereotype-mongering right there. Does Big Hollywood know about this?

25:29: Macchio soliloquizing to himself about Elizabeth Shue ("I think she's beautiful") while chewing brocolli is some bizarre pint-size would-be Brando bullshit.

31:49: Dude, I would not trust this kid with my bonsai tree. Not at all.

34:07: This is basically just the generically "Asian" version of a Magical Negro. Daniel's mom works at a restaurant called Oriental Express, no less.

36:20: He comes to the school costume dance hiding in an ad hoc shower stall? Really?

38:50: Things that don't happen in PG movies anymore: a kid rolling a joint in a bathroom stall.

42:14: Less than convinced by Miyagi's prowess. His kicks seem too soft to really connect.

55:52: Finally got to "wan on, wax off." This is going real slow; aside from visiting the dojo, not a whole hell of a lot has happened. And even that was surprisingly anemic.

58:53: Seeing Macchio with Shue, one of Johnny's crew yells "Must be Take A Worm For A Walk week." Heh.

1:02:58: First at the Golf 'n Stuff Family Fun Center. Lord save us. Shue's parents are such stereotypical rich assholes, sneering at Macchio's location and fresh from the tennis court. At that rate, why is Shue even enrolled in public school? Surely they can afford better.

1:03:44: She has to teach him putt-putt golf technique? She has to hold him? Will Macchio's total emasculation never end?

1:09:20: "Man who capture fly with chopsticks accomplish anything." I'm not sure this is actually true.

1:17:40: No one warned me about Miyagi's terrifying bellow.

"Turn It On"/"Cut Your Hair"

Imagine this: it's 1994. You're moderately fascinated by the whole idea of "indie rock," which is about to crest faster than the hair metal it was allegedly going to replace. Right now, though, it looks like it's about to take over the world; what you don't know is that in five years Pavement will be as dead as Kurt Cobain's about to be and a record contract will no longer be a matter of just seeming alternative cred-ish enough. As a dutiful, zeitgeisty representative of your generation, you're watching MTV. Beavis and Butthead are on, and they're mocking a guy with orange hair who's singing about jelly. That song will become a novelty single, and The Flaming Lips will, for a long time, seem like one-hit wonders.

But realize this: Beavis and Butthead are the audience college rock wants to evangelize, and they're the reason Stephen Malkmus never took over the world. They're aware that there's this thing going on called "college music," and they're appropriately dubious about it. This video's beyond brilliant; it's the final word on the subject. B&B sway along; 35 seconds in, Butthead stops swaying. "Uh-oh," he says, "I think this is 'college music.'" "Yeah," agrees Beavis; "you can tell because that dude has orange hair." Spot-fucking-on; plus you can also tell "because they're in a field." And Butthead comes in one more time for the kill: "How come he keeps singing about these people he knows? Who gives a rat's ass." Beavis starts mocking the song: "I know a guy! His hair is orange! He sucks!" It's about as succinct an attitude as you could have to the most self-righteous proponents of indie rock at the time: why are they singing nonsense? Why do they think their music is inherently special? Why are they on MTV, right next to Metallica?

"She Don't Use Jelly" is a totally decent song as far as it goes, which is to say it should be annoyingly "quirky" but is just crunchy and fun enough to get away with it. As it happened, Beavis and Butthead mocking it was the best thing that had happened to the Lips' career at that point, pushing the band to a new level of fame/temporary record label security. They ended up on "Beverly Hills 90210," and Warner Bros. kept trying to cross-platform them in the oddest places: it's safe to say "Bad Days" didn't belong in Batman Forever (not that anything deserved that fate), nor "Buggin'" in Austin Powers. But it's not the most obvious single on the album; that would be "Turn It On," a better song that's worth thinking about at length. [For the purposes of this argument, I'm basically going to have to ignore everything the Lips did before 1993 or after 2002. Deal with it.]

Generally speaking, Wayne Coyne is a weird but far from impenetrable lyricist; he's singing about superficially outre subjects (girls fighting robots, beestings), but he's always transparently thinking about maintaining mental optimism in a world of mortality and evil; it's Camus for indie rockers. He doesn't normally peddle satire or oblique lyrics. But "Turn It On" is sly mokcery, and thus kind of an anomaly in the catalogue; normally, Coyne is neither oblique nor mean-spirited. It's a kick-ass song, which doesn't hurt, but it's also a promo for the band.

"Turn It On" is the first song on Transmissions From The Satellite Heart. In the first verse, Wayne's just hanging: "Put your face up to the window," he tells his friend. "Tell me all about your gay folks." Fine (whatever that means). But in the second verse, it gets weird. "Put your face where we can see it/Put it on a show on cable/You can really show it all there/Turn it on when you are able." OK, so: there's an alternative music culture spreading on cable (this is before MTV went to hell) and the Lips want their cut of the money. So as a conscientious cultural consumer, right now the best thing you could do is watch TV; it will enrich you, and most specifically this (carefully unnamed) channel (which you watch "when you ain't got no relation to all those other stations") will push culture forward. This is kind of a horrible, cynical thing to say, and on one level Coyne's kidding (no band that had been playing the label game could've been that naive at that point), but he's also half serious: the band needs you to get them put into rotation. And that's exactly what happened: the song prophecies itself. (There's also the slight but real possibility that The Flaming Lips, like a shocking number of people, were generally optimistic about MTV as a force for cultural good in 1993. That didn't last.)

In retrospect, bands like Mudhoney (Mudhoney!) were supposed to be the beneficiaries and heirs of alt-rock, shaking up the record labels etc. In practice, The Flaming Lips — the last band you'd expect out of the post-Nirvana signings bonanza — toughed it out on a major label and eventually became stoner festival favorites and almost certainly one of the more profitable American touring acts. This is weird; no one in 1993 probably could've seen that one coming. And because of the peculiarly snarky nature of "Turn It On," it slots nicely alongside other meta-dispatches from the music wars. Most specifically: "Cut Your Hair."

I'd heard from someone a long time ago that when Beavis and Butthead watched "Cut Your Hair," they screamed "TRY HARDER"; regrettably, this turned out not to be true. Regardless: "Cut Your Hair" is generally considered the snarkiest meta-song about '90s music, what with all the talk about "special new bands" and the death of metal ("NO BIG HAIR"). But "Turn It On" is even more assaultive: Malkmus is being unusually direct (for him, anyway) but Coyne's pretending to invoke Timothy Leary and trippy alt-culture — in the name of cable airplay. This is a good joke, especially now that the Lips are the career band institution they are.

Gawker/HRO/Tumblr

[NB: I just wrote this this afternoon because it's been preying on my mind for literally years and I didn't want to draft this and then never post it because I'm too lazy to edit it. There's a very high chance I'll be dipping in and tweaking it for the next few weeks. That said: let's rock. Also noted: as Mike D'Angelo points out, I don't "make the case that this sensibility is infecting general discourse," which is absolutely true: this is about some very, very niche stuff that has almost nothing to do with most of what's out there. This is some real ephemeral, micro stuff afflicting a tiny corner of the internet that -- demographically -- happens to be my corner, and frankly if you don't already have a good working grasp of Gawker/Tumblr/HRO I'd stop right now. Also: yes, this is a tad over-the-top and disproportionate. I acknowledge that, but that doesn't mean my vehemence isn't real.]

In the summer of 2007, due to a lot of unreplicable circumstances (long story), I was very comfortable financially without having to do much work. I was living in my very first apartment, a large, hardwood floor, nice-ish set-up in a terrible part of Brooklyn (the Bushwick-Aberdeen stop on the L, which is 13 stops into Brooklyn; I was a block from the projects). Since it was summer and I was still in college, I didn't know a lot of people; most of them had gone back to wherever they were from. So it was just me, my then-girlfriend and my laptop. Which is how I spent the summer of 2007 watching Emily Gould have a mental breakdown online.

Before we go any further, let me say that I don't have any real interest in Gould as a living, breathing human being; I say this because, judging by her Tumblr (which frequently consists of her freaking out about people saying mean things about her), she has the Google Alerts turned on like none other. I'm more interested in the language she helped create, which I personally feel is destroying the capacity for intelligent thought on the internet one listicle at a time. But this isn't really a personal thing; I'm not accusing her (or anyone) of deliberate mendacity/being a bad person. (I mean, she well could be, but that's none of my business.)

At the time, Gould seemed like a force for good. I'd been reading Gawker off and on since 2003 [IT SAID 2000, FIXED]; since I almost never have a TV, it seemed like good mental junk food and it fed into my obsession with New York City while I was still feeling stuck in Austin. Initially, Gawker was fairly phenomenal: they did snarky gossip about Manhattan media non-entities unknown to the rest of the country, creating their own mythology as they went. Then Gawker seemed to be jumping the shark (although in retrospect they weren't even close to their current nadir); it was unclear what they were focusing on (the site basically devolved into reblogging bullet points with commentary), and the schtick was getting calcified. Gawker went from a site with a narrative to a site selling only one thing: its voice. And that voice was, for a while, Emily Gould.

What Gould was doing seemed like a reasonable response to the position she'd been placed in: she would write completely bullshit posts about her personal life (accurately tagged "Emily's LiveJournal"), then she would engage in what seemed like passive-aggressive sniping against evil Gawker overlord Nick Denton (the Rupert Murdoch of New Media), and in the last two weeks -- after giving notice and serving out her term -- she went totally bats. Before Twilight and Teams Edward/Jacob, there was Team Emily in the Gawker comment squadron. The best part? No one in the real world cared at all. It was the most entertaining teapot tempest ever. (Aside: blogging at the pace Denton demands takes incredible mental stamina and the ability to write literately fast, which is one of the harder things you can do day-in/day-out. It's hard to really hate any of the Gawker writers per se; they're all clearly people of above-average intelligence hired to do basically demeaning work.)

With all the fun, I failed to notice the real point: Gould came up with and perfected a house style that Gawker now ruthlessly imparts to all its writers, to a degree that's kind of incredible. It's easier to imitate than explain, but basically it's passive-aggressive finickiness disguised as wit. Contractions are generally avoided, giving the prose an affectedly flat cadence that seems "deliberate" and "not like it was written in ten minutes to meet the insane post quota." Punctuation is soiled with great regularity; question marks are used where there's no question, exclamation points proliferate like a five-year-old shouting. The oddly childlike nature of the prose -- its deliberate suggestion of faux-naivete -- blends snark with tweeness, which is about as bad a mixture as I can think of. Chuck Klosterman got the tone absolutely down: "If you've spent any time trolling the blogosphere, you've probably noticed a peculiar literary trend: the pervasive habit of writers inexplicably placing exclamation points at the end of otherwise unremarkable sentences. Sort of like this! This is done to suggest an ironic detachment from the writing of an expository sentence! It's supposed to signify that the writer is self-aware! And this is idiotic. It's the saddest kind of failure."

The problem with this kind of writing is that it precludes actually writing anything funny, or surprising, or fresh. It's an updated version of the problem George Orwell nailed in "Politics and the English Language" (which I realize may well be the most overquoted essay pulled out by anyone complaining about bad writing, but it's still the best): "the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." This language isn't slovenly, but it's self-satisfied even when it's blatantly terrified. Example: a few months ago, a blogger synopsizing "The Hills" -- apparently mandatory for any website that wants traffic -- referred to it, pseudo-humorously, as a "Pynchonian text." This literally makes no sense, and there's no bullshit analogy she pulls out to extrapolate or justify it; it's just a reference whose sole function is to say "Look! Although I'm blogging about 'The Hills,' I'm actually a serious, literate person exercising my analytical/linguistic skills in the name of frivolous careerist bullshit so that someday I can write about something I care about. Just because I like this show doesn't make me an idiot." Which is sad, but doesn't make it any less annoying to read. And this stuff is all over the internet as a default style. I hate it so much: it makes personal tone a matter of robotic consistency.

Think I'm getting needlessly worked up over nothing? I'm just getting started. (Feel free to get some more coffee/beer; this is going to take a while if you have the fortitude to tough it out with me. God knows I'm sheepish about how long this is.) That, more or less, was Phase I of Language Stuff That Makes Me Hate The Internet More Every Day. (Trust me: no one hates the internet more than people who work "on" it in some capacity, and that goes double for me.) Phase II arrived with Tumblr, the easy-blogging format that actively celebrates incoherence, illiteracy and using loooooooots and looooooooooots of vowels and CAPITAL LETTERS FOR EMPHASISSSSSS in the name of "sincerity." The company's public face -- its optimal user, its alpha and omega -- is one Meaghan O'Connell, who I'm sure is a perfectly nice person but whose writing makes me want to claw my eyes out (or maybe just spill coffee on her iPhone, not sure which). At the top of her blog it says "Life is hard. Here is someone," which sounds nice and maybe like hard-earned wisdom -- life is difficult, here I stand with existential fortitude ready to battle it out -- and then comes falling apart with the sub-hed: "My name is Meaghan O'Connell and I am 25 and I live in Brooklyn and work for Tumblr and here goes nothing." All the Emily-isms are there: the deliberate overuse of "and" as a cutesy affectation (what those of us who sweated it out in Latin learned to refer to as "polysyndeton," technically), the conflation of name/location/technology as an emotional statement, the implication that we're just getting someone's bared soul and something brave is happening here.

If Emily Gould made "oversharing" fashionable (or controversial, or at least a buzz topic, or maybe just a stupid word), she was at least trying to write about it directly and clearly. Tumblr ups the ante, throwing every piece of moronic internet jargon and slang into the mix, shaking vigorously and downing the whole sewage cocktail with relish. I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time close-reading this stuff or providing examples: it mostly speaks for itself. Meaghano (Meaghano!) would like you to believe that this has a lot to do with David Foster Wallace (a common delusion among Tumblr practitioners). Hence posts like this (there's way more where that came from, trust me), which invite us to contemplate that DFW's polemics against irony/investment in being honest and kind even when it's difficult/unfashionable have finally blossomed amidst a thousand dancing-cat .gifs.

Because that's what Tumblr comes down to. There's a vile sub-section of Tumblr-istas who I'm not going to name because they're crazily vigilant about monitoring themselves and prone to throwing long, maudlin fits about "people being mean on the internet" and so on and I don't need the trouble, but here's what they do: 90% of their posts will contain some kind of image (frequently animal based), LOLCATS-speak and/or songs that are "meaningful" that they have a lot of "feelings" about. (The fact that the word "feelings" has been rebooted as something inherently positive is completely insane, but let that pass.) Or they'll talk about "The Hills." Or whatever. But then -- like an '80s sitcom in sweeps season -- there will be A Very Special Post occasionally, about something that's clearly emotionally important to the person writing, generally concerned with a) a past relationship in its failing stages b) childhood traumas and fears remembered, frequently family-related c) getting drunk and experiencing a mental breakthrough. The prose will often emerge like a groggy, hungover New Yorker refugee: the prose will be "terse" (or someone's idea of terse), frequently in the present tense, laced with heavy doses of the maudlin and faux life lessons wisdom. We are then supposed to applaud the Tumblr person, who has proven that they can skim the tides of crap pop culture without losing their intellectual/moral seriousness; they're just saving themselves for the big moment, when they can speak for a generation.

It's all pretty terrible.

Let me be unambiguously clear, and perhaps unnecessarily harsh: if there was some kind of hypothetical scenario in which the late and sorely missed (we need him more than ever, honestly) DFW was invited to sit down and contemplate the contents of our leading Tumblr-ists/-istas, there's a 99.7% chance he'd be appalled at the spectacle of people congratulating themselves for sharing every last thought they have, especially the heavy emotional ones that they haven't really thought through. Among other things, Tumblr celebrates drunken babbling and deep feelings; it prefers them, because it's "sincere." (In other words: the bloggers may want to be DFW, but mostly they're an even shittier Dave Eggers.) And this is stupid; it's the opposite of rigorous self-contemplation. It's narcissism disguised as something brave and positive, and as community-building. Worse yet: it's actively corrupting the minds of potentially decent writers, turning them instead into little more than riffers of the moment.

Now: am I saying this is Emily Gould's fault? OK, maybe it is a little (although I doubt she thought people were going to be looking up to/imitating her). But this Phase II mixture is way more toxic than her original brew because it's perilously close to being completely incoherent; when you start labeling the paterfamilias "LOLDAD," it's time to pack it up and go home. It celebrates the worst of the internet as its crowning achievement, and it's freakishly self-righteous in the process.

This, finally, brings us to Carles and Hipster Runoff. The Carles "project" basically involves pissing all over everything, all the time; it's kind of hilarious. What Carles does is talk about "relevant" music and what we can sloppily shorthand "hipster lifestyle choices and accessories" in a deliberately obtuse tone, combining newly coined words with text speak and daring you to take it seriously. His biggest weapon: scare quotes, deployed frequently. He knows what he's doing though: he doesn't vomit them up as randomly as the Gould-ites and Tumblrs use exclamation points. What Carles has figured out is that putting scare quotes around even something so ordinary as, say, "going to a movie" points out how self-conscious someone who's invested in a "lifestyle" can be about how every decision and action they take will reflect on them. This is a reasonable thesis. (The fact that Carles predated the rise of Tumblr and accurately predicted what it would develop into is kind of remarkable.) His use of text-speak isn't celebratory; it's openly derisive and vaguely terroristic. It's an appropriately contemptuous response to the state of things; the fact that the Tumblr-ites have appropriated some of his language (especially the practice of using "bro" as a suffix -- cf. "dadbro") without seeming to get the joke tells you everything.

I used to really despise Hipster Runoff -- it seemed unbelievably self-loathing -- but lately it's grown on me, especially when "Carles" (or whoever's manning the helm; he, too, has a house style that can be learned) just riffs on "news reports," taking the logic Gawker has adopted (i.e., that the art of media aggregation and commentary is one of style rather than actually contributing anything to the conversation) to its logical conclusion, refracting everything through one myopic lens. The difference is that Carles' lens is actually funny, while Gawker is just a deeply cynical exercise in seeing how many hits one alleged photo of Britney Spears getting drunk can rack up. This basically destructive attitude has alarmed some people: in a long, breathlessly sincere missive on the subject, Nick Sylvester seems to literally propose that this kind of attitude will filter down to the children of current hipsters and deprive their childhoods of joy (" Why won't you let my kids be kids? They will be the better for it. And you were too--and I'm so sad you don't see that. I'm so sad you don't remember how fucking hard it is, being that age, not knowing fuck-all how anything or anybody works, let alone yourself."), which would be fair if it weren't the case that 99.9999999% of the global population will never come within striking distance of the site. Once again, allying yourself with emotion for its own sake gets the better of a writer who clearly is not without talent.

And so personal internet writing in 2010 is an unholy beast indeed, combining bad slang, sloppy emotions and an alarmingly monolithic sensibility (allowing for regional deviations). I don't have a constructive suggestion for any of this (plus in the Big Internet Picture I'm basically a nobody, so who cares) except the obvious: write often and try to improve, think hard, learn to create unflashy but not putridly functional prose that will allow you to express yourself lucidly. All of which seems to have gotten lost somewhere, which is why Emily Gould haunts my dreams: like Morrissey, she started something she couldn't finish, but other people are perfectly happy to finish it for her.

The National, High Violet

Last year, The National released "So Far Around The Bend" on the Dark Was The Night compilation; they stated it was a one-off, a musical direction they wouldn't be pursuing any further. With its elaborate Nico Muhly arrangement and jaunty, near-syncopated bass-line, it's by far the cheeriest song they've ever released, flute solo and all. The lyrics firmly sketch out what being moderately successful but constantly depressed in New York feels like; the key chorus line is "Now there's no leaving New York." The song isn't pulling the old trick of juxtaposing something appalling with incongruously peppy music; instead, what it suggests is that getting pumped about your dejection means you're doing it right and are not alone. The National make depression fun. Their shows are the opposite of the pin-drop reverential silence Tindersticks command, with an audience primed for — as Matt Berninger sings on High Violet — the "summer lovin' torture party."

With the exception of their debut album and about half of The Virginia EP, The National have never released an inessential album: they're capable of pretty much everything but happiness. After sublimating the occasional screaming fits of Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers and Alligator into the coiled restraint of Boxer, something had to give. The result is High Violet — their fourth album that's inscrutable the first time you hear it and grows more insidious with every listen.

Tonally, the closest antecedent is the Cherry Tree EP: the stalker-ish "All Dolled-Up In Straps" and brooding "Cherry Tree" are among their most dramatic material but don't even begin to prepare you for the sonic mess here. The difference this time is that the songs aren't concealing their hands the way The National normally do; this is full-blooded maximalism, to an extent that's disconcerting. When they played opener "Terrible Love" on "Late Night With Jimmy Kimmel," they appeared to have taken a page from the U2 playback; the guitars had The Edge written over them, and it seemed way over-the-top. On record, though, those guitars are more of an obfustactory squall than anthemic propellers. "It's a terrible love and I'm walking with spiders," Berninger repeats — a hell of an opener, and an announcement that the oft-elliptical-but-basically-clear lyrics of The National have finally reached a divide in which very straightforward, potentially embarrassing statements alternate with blatant nonsense. Berninger's coining words like crazy now: "Bloodbuzz," "Lemonworld," "Vanderlyle." It suits him.

So The National aren't interested in repeating themselves. Hence it's a schizoid record, split in half, a journey from confusion to clarity. If it were an LP, the break would come after the reasonably straightforward "Bloodbuzz Ohio"; the weird but clean guitar tone that opens "Lemonworld" (which, god bless them, features something that might quite possibly be a bandoleon) announces we've made it out of the haze. The mix gets a lot less overwhelmed at that point.

The two densest songs are "Terrible Love" and "Little Faith," both of which might give you pause the first time you hear them. If you were already inclined to dislike The National, you might uncharitably deem them "florid." With its swirling cello, minor keys and muttered depression ("Now I'm stuck in New York and the rain's coming down"), it's lushly dark. One of The National's traditionally-blue-blood-named women is present, of course: "Don't be bitter Anna, I know how you think." (Would that be the first album's "Anna Freud" perhaps? But related to Karen and Ada all the same.) The capper to that is a rare straightforward rhyme: "You're waiting for Radio City to sink." The city's drowning.

Water's everywhere on this record: "you must be loving your life in the rain," Berninger tells what I take to be an absent lover on "England." The opposite of water (both bodies of and/or precipitation) is The City — assuredly New York. It's strange to think of this as a "summer record": it's not breezy, or dancy, or celebratory, or any of those other things we associate with sunny jams. But it's an honest reflection of what it feels like to slog through an NYC summer at its worst.

Though some misguided types would have you believe The National are just dressed-up blank rock or Nebraska brooders (the fact that they covered Springsteen confirms some people's worst suspicions), on High Violet the band sounds slightly less sui generis and mildly more attentive to outside influences. Two in particular stand out. One's a certain strain of Copland-esque Americana, where the held notes of horns or woodwinds conveys the infinite promise of a wide open prairie etc. etc. You hear it all over the album, most notably in the horn bursts and undertones of "England." And though Boxer had a lot of arrangements, High Violet always flirts with excess: at times it seems the band is not so much playing with an orchestra as that an orchestra has The National playing alongside. (The "worst" track — there's no true bummers — is "The Runaway," if only for the simple reason that the live radio version that I lived off of for a year is already perfect in its simplicity; the cello on the album version is fine but unnecessary, and Berninger's vocals are inexplicably slightly more restrained.)

The other influence, oddly enough, appears to be the lovely British band Doves, or at least someone like them: the strings of "Little Faith" vaguely resemble the strings (and, more importantly, atmosphere) of "The Man Who Told Everything," while the ethereal "Conversation 16" — with its major chords, back-up singers and vaguely electronic feel — floats like the band at their most stripped-down.

What else? There's the usual depressed zingers, more than you can handle ("Keep my head in the oven so you'd know where to find me" on "Conversation 16" is a particularly good one), and some of the non sequiturs hit the mark with Malkmus-esque accuracy ("We'll play nuns versus priests until somebody cries" on "Little Faith"). There are looped outro vocals, suggesting someone in the band's been listening to Animal Collective. There's "England," which sums up the depressing suspicion that someone you love is having sex with strangers in a foreign country better than anything I've heard. There's humidity, despair and — ultimately — the suggestion that the best rocking comes when you're too depressed to focus on anything else. The National may be the best band in America right now.