Rock's Big Questions

The world's greatest closers: Finishing the argument with a can't-miss list ofalbum enders

Aeroplane over the sea is one of my favorite albums of all time — and itfinishes on the sublime.
The Who have always known how to close.
Rain Dogs is Tom Wait' finest moment and he saves the best for last.
Want to discover some great unknown music? Check out the Tindersticks andparticularly the wooden-laden come-down on their debut album.

Editor's note: This is a new feature where Douglas Newman and Jim Beviglia, two of CultureMap's music writers, tackle rock's big questions in a spirited dialogue where no feelings are spared. This edition is Douglas' rebuttal to Jim's article on the best closing tracks of all time.

We encourage you, fair reader, to join the fray by leaving your own arguments and rebuttals in the comments.

Kudos Jim for your varied and unpredictable list! "Fight the Power" by Public Enemy is an inspired choice and "Waterloo Sunset" was lurking around my brain as I compiled my selections. It's a perfect pop song that could have easily become a standard. Ray Davies is a songwriting god.

Thanks for teeing up some of the obvious ones, although you'll notice that I didn't fully take the bait. Bruce Springsteen's "Jungleland" (from Born to Run) was just too obvious and I've always preferred the Kinks to the Beatles, so I also skipped over "A Day in the Life" from Sgt. Pepper's.

One of the Fab Four did manage to make my short list, though. I couldn't resist the Dylan trap and was happy to wrestle with choosing his ultimate closer. I could have easily made a solid case for "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" (from Blonde on Blonde) or "Sara" (from Desire) — both epics inspired by ex-wife Sara Lowndes — but I went with what I would deem his most ambitious song.

While a few of my choices might be considered a tad left of center, on the whole I think it will appeal to most serious music fans and novices alike.

"Desolation Row" by Bob Dylan, from Highway 61 Revisited (1965)

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Dylan closes one of the great albums in history with an "eleven-minute voyage through a Kafkaesque world of gypsies, hoboes, thieves of fire, and historical characters beyond their rightful time," as noted Dylanologist Clinton Heylin describes it.

The fingerpicked Spanish guitar is sublime and Dylan's delivery is hypnotic. Take a listen and you'll find that 11 minutes can pass in a flash.

"God" by John Lennon, from Plastic Ono Band (1970)

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OK, so officially it's not the final "song" on the album, but the 49-second "My Mummy's Dead" doesn't really count in my book. If you overlook this technicality, then "God" does serve as the last proper track on Lennon's searing debut solo record.

With lines like "God is a concept by which we measure our pain" and "I don't believe in Beatles," and "the dream is over," it's obvious that Lennon's wrestling with some mighty demons and that makes for some compelling listening.

"The Last Time I Saw Richard" by Joni Mitchell, from Blue (1971)

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This songs never fails to depress me. The vividness with which Joni revisits a dissolved marriage hits you in the gut, made all the more powerful by the mundanity and resignation that infuse her lyrics.

"Love, Reign o'er Me" by The Who, from Quadrophenia (1974)

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The Who know a thing or two about closing albums on a high. "Won't Get Fooled Again" finished off Who's Next with fist-raising fury and the band's masterpiece, Quadrophenia, is wrapped up with the emotional bombast of "Love, Reign o'er Me."

"Radio, Radio" by Elvis Costello and the Attractions, from This Year's Model (US Version) (1978)

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A blistering indictment of the radio and recording industries, “Radio Radio” features some of Costello’s most biting lyrics, all set to a furious new wave workout by the singer’s newly minted backing band, the Attractions. Costello spits his turns of phrase in rapid fire with inspiring results: “You either shut up or get cut up, they don’t wanna hear about it/It’s only inches on the reel-to-reel/And the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools/Tryin’ to anaesthetise the way that you feel.”

This Year’s Model is an astonishing achievement, an album full of amphetamine-fueled nuggets with no filler.

"Anywhere I Lay My Head" by Tom Waits, from Rain Dogs (1987)

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Rain Dogs is perhaps Tom Waits’ finest moment, an ambitious album of jarring songs that seer themselves into your brain upon first listen. Featuring angular rhythms, clanging percussion, amazing fretwork from guitarist Marc Ribot, and Waits’ gravely howl, Rain Dogs is a surreal joy ride through the inner workings of the songwriter’s twisted mind.

On “Anywhere I Lay My Head,” the album’s final track, Waits is accompanied by a Farfisa organ and a brass section as he explains to the listener his change in fortune. The song then shifts into an uptempo classic New Orleans style brass band romp to take us out.

"Tower of Song" by Leonard Cohen, from I'm Your Man (1988)

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Cohen grapples with the calling to his musical craft in this charming track of the 1988 tour-de-force, I'm Your Man. It finds the musician/poet explaining how he has no choice but to sing, as if the gods have chosen his destiny: "I was born like this, I had no choice/I was born with the gift of a golden voice/And twenty-seven angels from the Great Beyond/They tied me to this table right here/In the Tower of Song."

Notice the sly humor in Cohen's choice of words. Golden voice?

"The Not Knowing" by Tindersticks, from Tindersticks I (1993)

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I implore anybody who's up for discovering some unfamiliar music to seek out Tinderstick's sublime debut. The English band boasts a remarkably consistent catalog in a career now 17 years deep, but its first offering is, as one critic gushed, a "chamber pop masterpiece of romantic elegance and gutter debauchery."

Tindersticks bring the dark, dank and emotionally wrenching musical exercise to a close with this elegant woodwind-laden come-down. It's the perfect end to a perfect record.

"Street Spirit (Fade Out)" by Radiohead, from The Bends (1995)

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The Bends signaled the true arrival of Radiohead as one of the planet’s most promising bands, a distinction the band would achieve in spades in the following years. The final track of the album is the beautiful ballad “Street Spirit (Fade Out),” with its spellbinding repetitive guitar arpeggio and Thom Yorke’s inspired vocal wail.

The final lines of the album is also a quintessential closer, “All these things we’ll one day swallow whole/And fade out again and fade out again/Immerse your soul in love.”

"Two Headed Boy, Pt. 2" by Neutral Milk Hotel, from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998)

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One of my favorite albums of all time, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a song-cycle of astounding beauty, depth and originality. Fuzz guitar, organ, singing saw, accordion, trumpet, Uilleann pipes, euphonium, and Jeff Mangum’s unaffected voice and surreal lyrics mesh to form a kaleidescopic head trip.

The record’s final track, “Two Headed Boy Pt. 2,” opens with a bowed saw intro and segues into a lyrically dense ballad featuring just an acoustic guitar and Magnum’s voice. A sublime ending to a breathtaking album.

The first article in this debate:

For Closers only: Great finishing songs that demand rock recognition

Movie Review

Camp Miasma puts a comedic twist on the classic slasher movie

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Photo courtesy of MUBI

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

The horror genre really ramped up in the 1970s and ‘80s, bringing the slasher subgenre that gave audiences new visuals of gore, but also a reliance on sexism and homophobia that would come to define the era. The new film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma wrestles with that legacy in ways that are funny, thought-provoking, and downright strange.

Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is a queer filmmaker who has been hired to reboot the moldy IP that is the Camp Miasma franchise, one that was fresh in the 1970s but which numerous shlocky sequels have rendered irrelevant. In an attempt to get to know the property better, Kris has scored a meeting with the reclusive Billy (Gillian Anderson), the star of the original film who has shunned the public eye for decades.

Turns out that Billy lives deep in the woods at Camp Rivoli, which served as the location for the first film. As Kris tries to get to know Billy and convince her to be a part of the new film, she starts to fall under Billy’s spell and the lore of the franchise as a whole. That includes believing that the movie’s villain, Little Death — a transgender person who has an air conditioning vent as a head/mask — may not just be a character created for the movies.

Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow), the film at first feels like it’s going to go the straight-up comedy route, with comic explosions of blood, a strange fascination with candy brands, and a production design that does nothing to hide that the two main actors are on a movie set with painted backdrops. This is backed up by Kris’ phone conversations with her girlfriend, Mari (Jasmine Savoy Brown) and her agent (Sarah Sherman), as well as numerous other details.

But the film starts to go down the surreal route the longer Kris stays at the camp with Billy, especially when they sit down to watch the original Camp Miasma. An extended sequence shows a good amount of that film-within-the-film, demonstrating why Kris and Billy have a love/hate relationship with the property. For Kris, though, the lines between the film and the real world start to blur, and Schoenbrun uses a variety of out-there elements to drive the point home.

The final act of the film can barely be described as Kris goes deeper down the rabbit hole, with Schoenbrun using her film to comment on the horror genre as a whole, its treatment of women and LGBT people, the movie industry, and more. All the while the “camp” of Camp Miasma maintains a presence, with candy wrappers showing up everywhere and the tongue-in-cheek references to Little Death (the French term La petite mort, which means “the little death,” is a euphemism for orgasm).

Einbinder, an Emmy winner for Hacks, is the perfect person to inhabit her role. Her established real-life and fictional personas color everything she does in the film, with her enthusiasm and curiosity shining through. Anderson leans heavily into another reference — Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard — to create a character that is as mysterious as she is alluring. Supporting actors like Brown, Sherman, Patrick Fischler, Dylan Baker, and Eva Victor keep the movie at the right pitch all the way through.

While other films have made fun of horror movie tropes before, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma finds a wholly unique way of doing so. It’s a funny and daring trip into the psyches of two women who may be victims of their own obsessions, and of the movies that made them that way.

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now playing in select theaters

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