MGMT: Congratulations

Who: MGMT

What: Congratulations

Sounds like:  Syd Barrett reincarnated as a 21^st century Indie hipster

Reviewed by Matthew Dannenberg

Two years after their breakthrough hit Oracular Spectacular, MGMT return with a new full-length album: Congratulations.  Whereas the duo’s debut was fueled by catchy, single-ready pop tunes, the new offering sounds much more like Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd—always weird and psychedelic, alternating between fun-loving and creepy, often within the same song.

The album opens with a California-surfer-meets-late 60s-sit-com romp (“It’s Working”), continues through the brooding crescendos of “Someone’s Missing” and “I Found a Whistle,” before ending on a decidedly low-key note (“Lady Dada’s Nightmare,” “Congratulations”).

Congratulations almost completely lacks the catchy and playful hooks that made Oracular Spectacular such a huge commercial success.  Even “Flash Delirium,” the album’s first single, substitutes pure kookiness for the broad appeal and sing-a-long stomp of earlier singles like “Kids” and “Electric Feel.”  This isn’t to say that it’s a bad album, because it’s not.  It also isn’t a particularly good album, despite (or because of?) its many quirks.

Magic moments: “Flash Delirium” and “I Found a Whistle” are both quite good, and “Lady Dada’s Nightmare” is a delightfully spooky instrumental that starts out like most of the other songs before morphing into a wall of sound and screams, which gradually fades into a Godspeed You Black Emperor!-esque outro.

Get or forget: The lack of a broadly appealing single and the general forgettableness of the album’s offerings mean that MGMT will certainly find fewer fans with Congratulations than they did with Oracular Spectacular.  However, the same attributes preventing it from becoming a huge hit also make the album interesting, if not infinitely listenable.

Overall:  5/10

Orianthi “Believe” (CD)

Who: Orianthi

What: Believe

Style: Pop

Released: Oct. 26^th, 2009

Reviewed by Eric Bourassa

If you think you’ve heard Orianthi Panagaris before, than you’ve probably seen Michael Jackson’s posthumous cinematic release, “This Is It,” featuring the now 25-year old guitarist shredding her way through all of his greatest hits and preparing for a world tour with the pop legend.

With her Jackson days over, the Australian guitarist/singer/songwriter is now making a name for herself center stage with the solo debut, Believe (Geffen).

The tracks are standard pop rock material in the vein of Kelly Clarkson and Avril Lavigne. Thanks to the help of over twenty songwriters, Geffen Records has made sure that Orianthi’s songs live up to current pop music standards. And they do. The catchy radio-friendly drive of songs like “According to You” and “Bad News” would certainly be instant hits if they were recorded by the artist’s more well-known contemporaries. Songs like “Think Like a Man,” “What’s It Gonna Be,” and “Highly Strung” give a glimpse into the heavier, harder rocking side of Orianthi.

The lyrics in a few songs are slightly thought-provoking and help to establish Orianthi’s “woman in a man’s world” image (listen to “Think Like a Man”), but remain lacking overall. I’m going to California/I’ve got my bags by the door/And I’m ready to leave/So yeah I’m moving forward (“Feels Like Home”) Of course you are. I’ve never before heard of an aspiring musician ready to head west and begin their rock and roll way of life.

The true strength in Orianthi’s identity lies in her guitar playing. The brief lead heading into the first chorus of the opening track, “According to You,” gives us a taste of what’s to come. The rest of the album sounds like an amalgam of run-of-the-mill pop rock and Eddie Van Halen shred guitar.

It seems as though Orianthi is unsure of her place in the world of music. Is she a female pop-star or a hard-rocking shred artist? Only time will tell if the world will welcome Orianthi into their Ipods or shun her average pop rock style with superb guitar playing.

Magic Moments: “Highly Strung” features legendary guitarist Steve Vai trading licks and providing stimulating harmony to Orianthi’s shining guitar artistry.

Get or Forget: If you like pop music and want something new to fill the void, this is a good buy. If you want purely good guitar music, download “Highly Strung” and forget the rest.

Overall: 6/10

Modern Japan: A Very Short Introduction

Christopher Goto-Jones, Modern Japan: A Very Short Introduction.  Oxford University Press, 2009.  159 pages.  $11.95

Reviewed by Matthew Dannenberg

In the newest installment of Oxford University Press’s long running Very Short Introduction series (202 volumes published so far), Christopher Goto-Jones covers the history of Japan since the mid-nineteenth century.  Beginning with the arrival of US Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853, Goto-Jones traces Japan’s complex relationship with the modern world, a relationship characterized on the one hand by Japan’s adoption of modern technology and on the other by its rejection of the modern worldview embraced by the “West.”  Goto-Jones concludes that Japan’s identity crisis (or rather, its series of identity crises) in the face of the “modern” has shaped every aspect of Japanese culture and civilization.  The question of how to remain distinctly “Japanese” while still taking advantage of modernity’s benefits becomes one of the central concerns for the Japanese people.

While any history book, regardless of subject, is bound to be dense with information, the density is much greater in one that covers its subject in only 150 pages.  Despite inundating the reader with names and dates, Goto-Jones rarely, if ever, leaves the reader behind.  In part, he accomplishes this by establishing specific themes from the very beginning and using them throughout the remainder of the book to form connections and parallels, thus providing a superstructure to which the specific historical terms and facts can be attached.

One theme to which Goto-Jones continually returns is the effect of modernity on Japanese culture and how the Japanese people, entering the modern world, relate to their cultural traditions and heritage.  In many ways, all events in modern Japanese history—from the Samurai rebellions of the nineteenth century through the “lost decade” of the 1990s—can be seen as an attempt to answer this identity question.  It seems to be a question without an answer, as many Japanese political and artistic leaders have provided a different vision.

Goto-Jones also repeatedly ties modern Japanese history to Japan’s relationship to the rest of the world.  Before the arrival of Commodore Perry, Japan had a long history of being deliberately isolationist, even to the point of attacking any ships that approached their harbors.  As Japan developed into a “modern” nation, however, it became clear that it must interact with the rest of the world.  This has often led to military conflicts, particularly with Japan’s neighbors—China, Russia, and Korea especially—and in World War II.  Japan’s post-war encounters with the rest of the world are equally notable.  Starting in the 1950s, Japan experienced tremendous economic growth, and after the breakup of the Soviet Union, it was the second largest economy in the world, trailing only the United States.

Of course, the goal of any Very Short Introduction is not to provide a comprehensive survey or analysis of a country’s history, but to provide some basic knowledge, to build a framework around which more can be added through additional study, and to guide the reader in further research.  But more than anything else, a short introduction ought to increase the reader’s interest in a topic.  In this respect, Goto-Jones does an admirable job, and for any who might be interested in Japan, his book provides an excellent starting point.

On the Shelf…

I am currently reading Modern Japan: A Very Short Introduction by Christopher Goto-Jones.  I will review it sometime this weekend.  Modern Japan is number 202 in Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction series.  For those who are unfamiliar with this series, each book is typically between 100 and 150 pages and covers all topics from science and math to literature, history, and art.  After I finish with Modern Japan, I will (probably) review the following lineup of books (all published in 2009):

American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny (2 volumes) edited by Peter Straub

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original by Robin D. G. Kelley

Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating by Mark Bittman

VALIS and Later Novels by Philip K. Dick

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins

-Matthew Dannenberg

Joe Satriani- Live in Paris (DVD)

Who: Joe Satriani
What: Live in Paris: I Just Wanna Rock (DVD)
Style: Instrumental Rock
Released: Feb. 2nd, 2010

Reviewed by Eric Bourassa

Just when Satch fans began to question if the master of instrumental rock had permanently left his solo career for the super-group Chickenfoot, Live in Paris hits store shelves with all its might.

The new live DVD (also available on 2-disc CD) features 22 songs recorded at the Grand Rex Theater in Paris, France in the Spring of 2008.

The show kicks off with the high energy call-and-response anthem, “I Just Wanna Rock,” immediately requiring the audience’s attention (and interaction), reminding the listener why they’re there in the first place- to ROCK! And rock they do. With the help of his usual band and the return of bassist Stu Hamm, the group puts on a show that appeals to longtime fans as well as newcomers who expect everything from the old hits to brand new material.

All of the classics that made Satriani a legend are present, including “Satch Boogie,” “Flying in a Blue Dream,” and “Summer Song.” For fans who have seen Joe’s live material before, this is more of the same. Perhaps the most exciting track is the new rendition of “Always With Me, Always With You,” which ends with a five-minute jam that crescendos to a powerfully improvised climax.

Longtime fans will be excited to hear eight of Satch’s newest tunes that have never been featured live before. Standouts include the weirdly unexpected “Ghosts,” and “Diddle-Y-A-Doo-Dat.”

Magic Moments: “Ghosts” was featured as a bonus track to the album Professor Satchifunkilus and the Musterion of Rock that was only available when the album was downloaded on Itunes. This is a true gem.

Stu Hamm’s Bass Solo ends the same way it did on Live in San Francisco, but the lead-in creates a powerful atmosphere that is entertaining to listen to and to watch as Stu two-hand taps nearly every note of this masterpiece.

Get or Forget: This one is worth picking up whether you’re new to Satriani’s music or not. The virtuosity and flash of watching the guitarist blaze across the fretboard is well worth the price of admission.

Overall: 8/10

The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories

Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.  Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.  500 pages.  $28.95

Reviewed by Matthew Dannenberg

In their most recent work, acclaimed husband and wife translation team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky tackle some of the short works of Leo Tolstoy, one of Russia’s greatest novelists and story tellers.  Though they have previously published two of Tolstoy’s mammoth novels (War and Peace and Anna Karenina), as well as collections of short works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, and Nikolai Gogol, this is their first collection of Tolstoy’s stories.

Tolstoy wrote most of the tales in this collection after he had finished his two great novels, and these stories reflect some changes in Tolstoy’s worldview and literary concerns.  For one thing, as Pevear notes in his introduction, Tolstoy began “to purge his art of what he came to regard as its artistic pretensions and superfluous detail” (viii).  The stories in this volume are often crisp, stark portraits of a grim reality.  While they are artistically and formally beautiful, they are not ornate or florid.

In his short works, Tolstoy also abandons characters from Russian high society and focuses on perfectly “ordinary” men and women—soldiers, as in “Prisoner of the Caucasus” and “Hadji Murat,” small landowners in “Diary of a Madman” and “The Devil,” and even servants and serfs, as in “Alyosha the Pot.”  Tolstoy portrays these characters, as he does in his novels, without sentimentality or overt moralizing, putting in full display the good, the bad, and the mundane.

More than anything else, these stories each share, in one way or another, Tolstoy’s deep concern with death.  Speaking to Maxim Gorky, Tolstoy once remarked that “If a man has learned to think, no matter what he may think about, he is always thinking of his own death…  And what truths can there be, if there is death?” (xi).  Tolstoy’s concern with death—and, by extension, with the “good life”—winds its way through each of these stories.

In the title story, “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” Tolstoy’s fascination with death is on full display.  In it, he portrays a perfectly ordinary man whose life is brought to an end by the most mundane activity—redecorating his living room.  While hanging some curtains, Ivan Ilych falls and hits his side against a doorknob.  Though his injury only gives him mild discomfort at first, the pain increases until Ivan Ilych begins consulting doctors.  Before long, Ivan Ilych realizes that he is dying, though he cannot accept this fact.  He spends his final days and weeks wrestling with this consciousness, and he eventually wonders if perhaps he did not live as he should have.  Again, he cannot accept this: “when it occurred to him, as it often did, that it was all happening because he had not lived right, he at once recalled all the correctness of his life and drove this strange thought away” (85).

The question of how we ought to live remains unanswered in “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” as it does in many of Tolstoy’s other stories.  As this was the central question of Tolstoy’s life, so is it in his tales.  This answer to this all-important question—which Tolstoy hints and guesses at—is left for we the readers to answer for ourselves.  Yet this is the great power of Tolstoy’s writing, his ability to draw out this question, to place it before us on the page, and allow us—along with his characters—to answer it as we see fit.

The ATR Crew

I successfully recruited three new reviewers– Eric Bourassa, Sam Filcik, and Jonathan Sietsema.  Each of us will be responsible for one type of review (though there will be some cross-over): I will do books, Eric will do music, Sam will do video games, and Jonathan will do movies.  Between the four of us, we hope to keep the site fresh and interesting.  Expect to see our first reviews within the next week.

-Matthew Dannenberg