The Impulse International - 'Hollywood Underground'

Stiff Records’ power pop spirit, however recycled, resides in The Impulse International. The American band’s German-pressed seven-inch Hollywood Underground, from Finnish label Killer Records, is brisk at a mere two songs, but like a cheap beer with a higher than average alcohol content, it’ll still get you where you need to go.

Owing a great deal to Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds, and the like, the vinyl opens with its nervous, jittery, peppy title track. Admittedly, the band milks the brief chorus of “oh oh oh / this is Hollywood underground” a few times too many, but it’s not too bad. Plus, each part is so brief that it’s hard to really get sick of it. The guitar solo lasts maybe 1.5 seconds. The choruses maybe 20. In fact, the bridge might be the longest section.

The B-side, “Gotta Run Home,” is the stronger track. Slightly slower, each section has more breathing room. There’s an honest-to-Bob intro and even a jangly guitar lead. I’m a sucker for build-ups right before the last chorus, which the trio delightfully provides me with.

Hollywood Underground is a pleasing listen, albeit a derivative one. And while folks might be better off spinning My Aim is True, Labour of Lust, or Tracks on Wax 4, there’s nothing wrong with setting aside $4 for this little number as well.

Ill Ease - 'All Systems A-Go-Go!'

Screw bein’ serious; I and possibly, maybe, hopefully you, just wanna dance. I’m talking a silly little jig, preferably with some spinning thrown in. Said jig will last no more than five minutes because, honestly, I’m a bit out of shape. But for those gloriously stupid five minutes, I fully intend to pop in Ill Ease’s new album, All Systems A-Go-Go!. Then I will throw the cursed thing into the deepest, darkest nether regions of my closet.

Hailing from Brooklyn, New York and consisting of only one member, Elizabeth Sharp, Ill Ease is anything but what its name stands for. Rather, it/she is pretty easygoing, so much so that I’m not even sure how to write the band’s name. The front cover bills ‘em as “Ill Ease!”, the CD, “Ill Ease!!”, and iTunes and the spine of the CD case settle for just “Ill Ease.” Whatever. That’s just how she rolls, man.

The disc starts off with “Too Much Sucky (I Hate Drum Machines).” Sharp’s Brooklyn roots show right away. The fuzzy guitars, lo-fi recording, and ridiculously stupid lyrics all smack of “New York, 2001.” Coupling that with Sharp’s off-key, Kimya Dawson Lite voice makes for two strikes against the album within the first few seconds. But while “Too Much Sucky” lacks originality, it’s still a fun, rollicking number, albeit a tone deaf one. For the sake of preserving its silliness as much as possible, here’s a phonetic spelling of the song’s opening lines: “I hate drum machines. I hate drum mah-SHEEEEEENS!” Make sure you say that last part in a really high voice, now. Sharp’s criticisms of the pseudo-instrument start off practical, “They always keep the beat. They always stay on time.” Right on; it’s too perfect. I like my Ringo Starr off-kilter, clam-flammit. But after accusing drum machines of having “too much sucky and not enough fucky,” Sharp starts to get lazy, also claiming that drum machines are “always rhyming.” Then she cops the chorus from Devo’s “Whip It” for a whole verse. Righteous. Regardless, the loose playing and dance-tastic guitar work make the song an overall solid opener. It’s not brilliant, but at least it’s fun.

But after the absurd giddiness of “Too Much Sucky (I Hate Drum Machines),” the record settles for mimicking latter-day Sonic Youth. “New York No Wave” and “New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Milan (It’s Worldwide! It’s Fashion Suicide!)" both breeze by with a Thurston Moore coolness, but unremarkably so.“Walking Pneumonia” tries to liven things up by using the word “fuck” a lot. It boasts a fairly basic guitar pattern and an insistence on telling most of the United States (plus D.C.) to fuck off. Florida gets fucked twice. It’s like listening to a 12-year-old boy write his first song in between practicing “Hot Cross Buns” and “Blitzkrieg Bop.”

After the lengthy “Power Turns Me On!”, which is half-song and half-a-shit-load-of-noise, and two remixes (“I Love Drum Machines (Napoleon III Remix)?!” Finally, a chance to experience the nostalgia of… like a half-hour ago…), All Systems A-Go-Go! mercifully ends. It apes Sonic Nurse well enough in parts, which is cool, but I already have that album. I don’t need another one. At least we can agree on drum machines sucking, though.

Ivoryline - 'There Came a Lion'

“…I thought it might just be possible for me to make the trip abroad, by plane, expenses be hanged. However, I've since discussed the matter rather extensively with my wife, a breathtakingly levelheaded girl, and we've decided against it.” J.D. Salinger, “For Esme – With Love and Squalor”

I fucking hate scoring albums. Love writing about them; hate having to grade them. It’s too reductive. Scores imply that music, and art in general, isn’t really subjective (which it is), that you can quantify everything an artist does into values divisible by x. But music can provoke so many different reactions for so many different reasons, and giving it a number doesn’t always correlate. Sure, an album of true shit, devoid of all merit and meaning, deserves no stars (or in the punknews case, half of a star). But what do I score an album that I feel indifferent towards? Ivoryline’s There Came a Lion walks that fine line of indifference. I don’t actively hate it, but I certainly don’t love it. Since it’s middle of the road record, does that warrant a smack-dab-in-the-middle rating of two-and-a-half to three stars? Or does banality deserve the same treatment as, say, hate language or sexism?

In J.D. Salinger’s short story “For Esme – With Love and Squalor,” a nameless solider, referred to only as Sergeant X, describes to his wife as “breathtakingly levelheaded.” The line is funny because it subverts the old “breathtakingly beautiful” cliché, but what really makes it striking is its damning description that does not rely on sarcasm, profanity, violence, or anything of that sort. Sergeant X’s wife is horrid in her insurmountably unremarkable nature. To him, her existence is meaningless, loveless.

And that is how I feel about Ivoryline. The band hails from the nu-emo (numo?!) set, crafting spit-shined emotional pop drivel. There Came a Lion’s 11 tracks are indistinct, both from each other and from similar Drive-Thru Records-y acts. Dudes thank God a lot in the liner notes, but the tunes are never too overwhelmingly religious. In fact, a lot of these tunes could be about anything. Take track three, “Parade,” for example. The song repeats the line “This is your coming out parade” a bit. Right away, that makes me thing it’s a gay pride song, but the rest of the lyrics are so vague that the tune could easily be about losing one’s virginity, suffering religious intolerance, getting caught masturbating to Playboy: 50 Years: The Photographs in a Barnes & Noble bathroom, or something far more sinister.

There Came a Lion’s arrangements cram a lot of dance beats and breakdowns into the mix, which might work if the production wasn’t so darn tepid. Frontman Jeremy Gray loves operatic high notes, adding evidence to my theory that ’00s emo = ’80s hair metal, although at times he oddly recalls Anberlin or maybe even Ignite. Maybe I’m getting too old for this shit, but I can’t get behind Ivoryline. Maybe if they stripped the production down a bit, maybe if they stopped sounding like every other band on the Take Action compilations, maybe if they fucking split their name into two words, I could find something to hold and keep. As is, though, no thanks. If you’re 14, live in New Jersey, and think Jimmy Eat World’s Chase This Light totally summed up your summer, maybe you’ll dig Ivoryline. As for me, all I hear is mediocrity, and that is truly offensive.

Regarding 'I'm Not There'

In the 21st century, there are no mysteries. Americans hate them. Maybe it’s more of a general people thing, maybe not. Americans skip to the endings of books (when they can’t find Spark Notes), read the scripts and spoilers before films hit theaters and download the demos before albums come out. Book adaptations dominate theaters, ensuring that the plots are rarely new. Celebrity blogs and news feeds ensure that no artist has privacy. There are no alter egos or secret pasts.

The only thing denser than a Dylan song is a Dylan interview. The man’s personal anecdotes barely make sense on a historical, grammatical or logical level. Have you read his autobiography? It’s crazy. But there’s a charm to that. A mystery.

After the straightforward bio-pics of Ray Charles (Ray) and Johnny Cash (Walk the Line), it is somewhat refreshing to see director Todd Haynes portray the myth of Dylan over the real story with I’m Not There. Billed as “inspired by the many lives of Bob Dylan,” I’m Not There deserves credit for subverting the “get money, get famous, get overdosed” plot used by most music bio-pics. Instead, the film consists of a series of broken up short stories starring Dylan-esque characters. It’s a great idea, but ultimately, it falls into the same story arc as more straightforward films, like Hysteria - The Def Leppard Story.

Haynes still deserves credit for his effort, though. With a filmography that includes Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (starring Barbie dolls) and Velvet Goldmine (a David Bowie bio-pic without any Bowie music), he clearly knows how to make an arty film about an arty person. With a cast of Dylans played by Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Ben Whishaw and Marcus Carl Franklin, Haynes gets a lot of great performances. Support from Julianne Moore, David Cross, Charlotte Gainsbourg and more are also excellent.

Oddly enough, the best Dylan is a woman, Blanchett. She gets the most screen time, and her drugged-out, Blonde on Blonde-y Dylan is perhaps the closest to the real man. A close second goes to Bale, who plays clean cut folk Dylan and religious, grizzled ’80s Dylan, but Blanchett is the one who gets the best scenes. When she goes electric, she pulls a machine gun on her quiet, folk-loving audience. When she meets idol Allen Ginsberg (Cross), the meeting of two poetic geniuses is heartfelt, yet hilarious.

At the same time, though, Blanchett’s scenes are the most obsessed with drugs, which proves to be a crutch. Viewers see Blanchett falling over and being a tweaked-out jerk a lot, which, coupled with the womanizing/alcoholic Dylan played by Ledger, grows tedious. It’s not the lack of an upswing that makes it so, but the repetitive nature and similarity to other bio-pics. Walk the Line had the same problem—too much beatdown and not enough story-telling. Throw in the surreal but irrelevant “Billy the Kid” Dylan (Gere), and you’ve got a lot of filler.

Another problem plaguing I’m Not There lies in the music. There’s a fair amount of performance footage, and it’s kind of uneven. While Blanchett’s sneering “Maggie's Farm” and “Ballad of a Thin Man” and Bale’s understated “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” and “The Times They are A-Changin’” are great (and not sung by the actors), other cast members don’t do so well.

Newcomer Franklin, who plays Dylan as a runaway blues-singing child from Minnesota, has an overly precious performance of “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.” Worse, the over-produced cover barely synchs up with the actors on screen, further falsifying the experience. It’s a mess.

But as far as messes go, Haynes’ is a beautiful one. I’m Not There craps out three-quarters of the way through its 135-minute running time, but man is it gorgeous up until then. Haynes switches up his camera techniques according to character. Whishaw (We’ll call him “Conor Oberst” Dylan) gets grainy black-and-white to mirror his inquiry hearing, Blanchett gets classy black-and-white for her ’60s psychadelia, Bale and Moore both get color for their documentary-within-a-film approach… each story has its own style down to the particulars.

That’s I’m Not There’s problem, though. Haynes can’t reconcile all of the stories on a narrative or artistic level. The film feels like a conversation with Dylan himself, which is a compliment to Haynes’ understanding of the source material, but it also means that there’s a whole lot of muddled bric-a-brac. Still, while I’m Not There may not be perfect, at least its vision is a bold one, an interpretation to challenge the straight-forward, formulaic approach of the music bio-pic.