The Year in Music

Toasting revivals: from Adele's new pop standard to Paul Simon and other aging,raging rockers

Tom Waits
Adele
Photo via HaveeruOnline
The Decemberists
Justin Vernon of Bon Iver
Wilco
Paul Simon
Paul Simon/Facebook

Earlier this year, I was driving my 9-year-old daughter somewhere; I can't remember where or when. Hits 1, the SiriusXM channel for the hottest music of the day, was on, which is a given when the little girl is in the car.

My ears were being assaulted by one nonsensical piece of schlock after another, as usual, when the bleating receded to allow a lovely little piano arpeggio take center stage. In just moments, Adele’s wounded voice came on to accompany that piano, the beginning of “Someone Like You,” and I was floored.

That’s the funny thing about pop music: Just when you give up on it, something comes along to remind you why you fell in love with it in the first place.

Adele’s success not only revived the music industry (the monster sales for her album 21 were a major factor in the 3-percent increase in U.S. album sales), but it formed the first consensus between critics, fans, and radio in a dog’s age.

What was refreshing was how old-fashioned the execution was, a combination of excellent songwriting (mostly from Adele herself, the most underrated part of her skill-set); tasteful, soulful production; and a voice that recalls Aretha Franklin and Dusty Springfield and resonates with just about every wounded soul on the planet.

That’s the funny thing about pop music: Just when you give up on it, something comes along to remind you why you fell in love with it in the first place.

Adele is no doubt the dominant musical story from the year that was, but she wasn’t the only one. Here are some of the others that got my attention this year:

A new way to listen

Even if the music we heard wasn’t always inspired, the delivery systems for that music became more and more innovative. From Pandora to Spotify to music in the Cloud, I don’t quite understand all of it, but, as a music fan, I sure am enjoying it.

The idea that I can listen to just about any song on the planet anytime I want to is somewhat overwhelming to a guy who grew up trying to tape the hottest songs off the radio to my 8-track player just so I could listen to them at my own convenience.

The grumpy Luddite in me wants to turn up his nose at all of this; the music fan in me flips the Luddite off, sticks the headphones into the computer, and cranks the volume up.

Geezers on parade

Because radio means less and less these days in terms of success, older artists have come out swinging, knowing that they’ve got the best chance of being heard since they were in their heydays.

As a result, guys like Paul Simon, Robbie Robertson, Nick Lowe and Tom Waits showed the whippersnappers how it was done, putting out albums that were far more than echoes of past glory.

That's them in the spotlight

The morbid side of human nature demands that we use the end of the year as a time to reflect on what we’ve lost. It’s no different with music heroes, who always seem to leave us far too soon.

Among the many memorable figures who passed on this year, two stand out. Amy Winehouse’s sad deterioration cannot overshadow her singular talent, even if that talent was on display for far too brief a period. As for Clarence Clemons? Bruce Springsteen often described his saxophone player as the “King of the World.” Anyone who has ever heard the solo in “Jungleland” knows that there is no hyperbole whatsoever in that description.

Album of the year: Sorry, Adele, but no album gave me more enjoyment than the first one I heard in 2011 — The King Is Dead by The Decemberists.

R.E.M.’s members, thankfully, are still with us, but the band decided this year to call it quits. They parted on amiable terms, but, then again, they always did things a little different and a little better than other bands.

The best

I’m happy to report that there was enough great music this year to make compiling a best-of list a difficult proposition. So I’ll just throw some names out there off the top of my head:

Newcomers of the year: Tyler the Creator, Lana Del Rey, Dawes, Das Racist, Kurt Vile
Avoiding the sophomore slump in a big way: Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver
Continued greatness: Wilco, Radiohead

Which leaves my album of the year. Sorry, Adele, but as great as you were this year, no album gave me more enjoyment than the first one I heard in 2011: The King Is Dead by The Decemberists.

The band toned down the sci-fi trappings and hyper-literate lyrics and yielded a moving set of timeless songs that alternately rocked with brooding intensity and swayed with dreamy beauty.

In fact, I’ll think I’ll cue that up on Spotify right now. See you next year.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

movies film