Live Review

Is the most important part of a comedy show the laughs? If what's happening onstage is funny enough to have people doubled over in their seats, then it would seem they could consider themselves entertained. While student-run improv troupe Monkapult's end of the quarter performance in Balch theater certainly offered up consistent laughs, this particular performance was uneven to the point of distraction, and displayed a worrying rift between the newcomers and those who've been doing this for years.

Monkapult leaders and K seniors Alex Clothier, Ben Harpe, Terry Cangelosi, and Andrew Dombos have consistently used their grace, wit, and panache to create hysterical scenes that can succeed without any satellite performers, as evidenced by the Just Panda shows they perform with a scaled-back, more concentrated cast. Michelle Myers and Cooper Wilson, a junior and sophomore respectively, are also strong presences capable of creating and sustaining individual and group energy in scenes. They know when to give and when to take.

But the freshmen, for the most part, brought things down a notch on Friday. The night started with a game called "Hey Dude", a twist on the traveling message game "Telephone". Watching the original gestures be reinterpreted both physically and verbally was mildly amusing, but anyone who's played Telephone knows that the game loses meaning when people purposefully make easy, ridiculous embellishments on the original words and -- big surprise! The end result is something nutty. In this game, it's equally as lame to watch the truth in the scene derailed by someone going for cheap, easy laughs. Sam Bertken did this when he exaggerated things like "going to Frelon rehearsal" into "trying to dirty dance with girls to get them to come back to my room with me." It felt insincere and sacrificed the rest of the scene.

The majority of the show after that was comprised of a long-form game that started with one-word suggestions and developed into an expectedly loopy plot with crazy characters. Groups of three or four improviser interacted in short vignettes that established a story about a man who sold his soul to his brother. Cooper's rough and gravelly grandpa was hilarious and showed off his excellent pantomime skills; at one point he mimed setting out tobacco leaves and rolling papers, then told his adolescent grandchildren whoever could roll the fastest cigar would get to be an honorary adult for the day. The two grandchildren didn't do much besides repeat the same joke about cards 10 or so times.

Alex was equally funny as a rugged agriculture sage trying to teach more children how to handle themselves around a giant ox, played brilliantly by Dombos. "See Duke's a little bit of the MVP of the tillin' world. Lot of people tryin' to steal him. So whenever you're out there with Duke... you gotta pack heat." For all the laughs he got, it was obvious that without him the scene would be going nowhere. Ben's scene involving a stubborn woman not wanting to sit in a chair felt limp and static because no matter what energy he was giving, it just wasn't matched by those around him. The two freshman girls don't have the strong female presence Grace McGookey and Emily Harpe had, and the lack of physical comedy from study-abroad juniors Michael Chodos and Vince Kusiak kept things tame.

Perhaps the most telling part of the night was the introduction. As the lights dimmed and audience expectations were running high, a band of conspicuously unfamiliar impersonators took the stage and proudly declared, "We are Monkapult!" Everyone immediately understood the gag, which was both charming in its surprise and relieving in that we knew our beloved theater majors were somewhere hidden backstage. But after watching tonight's lopsided performance, it seems inevitable that Alex, Ben, Terry, and Dombos' graduation this spring will leave the team looking like a group of impersonators.

You taste like a burger. I don't like you anymore.

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I've had a legitimate man-crush on Paul Rudd ever since I saw "Wet Hot American Summer", so I eagerly read this profile of him by Dennis Lim on the Times' website. Going backwards from his new movie, "I Love You, Man", Lim traces Mr. Rudd's eclectic career with authority, insight, and charm. He touches on the "critical edge" part of our class's celebrity profiles when he brings up the fact that this new movie "fits squarely within the current vogue in American comedy for what sociologists would call homosocial intimacy and what MTV and trend-article writers have termed the bromance." Someone should have done their final on bros of the 21st century.

Miss March - Worst movie.

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I became intrigued by the movie "Miss March" when I saw that it had an overall score of 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, something only a true disaster could attain. The first clip of a review I read was scathing. "Cregger and Moore not only star in "Miss March," they wrote and directed it too, which seems like a selfless act akin to throwing yourself on a live grenade, protecting any innocent careers around you from getting hit by flying shrapnel," which made me even more interested. A teen sex comedy about a guy waking up from a 4 year coma to go on a cross country mission to win back his high school sweetheart that became a Playboy model in the meantime sounds pretty embarrassingly awful, and I wanted to hear A.O. Scott or Manohla tear it apart. But instead I got this disappointing piece by Rachel Saltz, the Times' resident Bollywood expert who apparently doesn't have the bloodthirst of her fellow critics. She lets this one off easy.

Her lede is pretty meh as a reductive plot summary, but the overhyphenated laundry list has a note of exasperation and it seems like she's ready to rant about how bad this movie is in the next paragraph. Psych. Unlike any of the other caustic reviews I've read, she actually tries to defend the comic sensibilities of its creators. But her praise is so vague and unsupported that I'm left feeling like she didn't really know what to say. Just read this:

"Mr. Cregger and Mr. Moore understand the ABC’s of comic opposites and comedy plotting. After Eugene wakes from his coma, Tucker springs him from the hospital for a road trip. Destination: the Playboy Mansion. And the ending neatly ties up all the plotlines."

Don't get me wrong, I don't consider myself a great critic and don't think I would've done any better under whatever the insane deadlines are at the NYT, but I feel like this is comparatively pretty mediocre, if not bad, compared to a lot of the other movie reviews we've read this quarter. "The ending neatly ties up all the plotlines?" That sounds like something I would have tried to write in my review of Gran Torino when I didn't know what the hell else to put but needed words. And how is the plot description line supposed to be evidence for the two guys understanding "the ABC's of comic opposites and comedy plotting"? What are the ABC's of comedy plotting anyway? Care to give an example? I feel like this says nothing.

The "but" comes at the beginning of the 4th paragraph, and it's as understated as the rest of the review: The problem with “Miss March” is that it isn’t very funny." Straight to the point, yes, but now you've got me ready for some panning. But she proceeds to riddle off a list of random disparate elements, then accuse the movie of being "tame". And when you're going to do the whole, "the guy behind me in the theater said something so hilariously insightful it sums up the movie and my opinion so perfectly that I'll use his quote as a conclusion" thing, the quote better be actually good.

The whole time I was just waiting for her to slay this thing and she did nothing but caress it gently then poke the air around it. I clearly need to step away from this.

The struggle of reviewing something extremely polarizing

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I know I keep linking to music reviews from the same site, but I think a lot of the writing on CokeMachineGlow is entertaining and intriguing, if needlessly wordy and pretentious. You usually just have to pretend the reviews have nothing to do with the album in question. This particular review brought up a question about criticism: If something's so extreme that the vast majority of people will not like it, do you have to qualify your review with warnings? And what;s the difference between liking the idea of something ("sounds good on paper") and actually enjoying the thing itself?

Using "Cities of Glass" by noise rock band AIDS Wolf as a starting point, Calum Marsh discusses the dilemma of recommending such an inaccessible album:

"Few bands, even those who specialize in abrasive music, come off as such an outright affront to standard conventions of taste and sensibility. Make no mistake: Cities Of Glass is a fucking assault. This is the kind of album that critics love to review because they get to come up with all sorts of creative ways of saying that this is loud, noisy music that is difficult to talk about in any context other than just how loud and noisy it is. Which is a shame, really, because for me what’s most exciting about Cities Of Glass is that it raises a lot of questions about the nature of not just music (“Is noise really music?”; “Are certain kinds of sounds inherently more appealing than others?”) but, more interestingly, about music criticism and the problem of taste. For instance: I generally like this record, and would recommend it to others, but I know perfectly well that most people—and not just Joe Top-40 or your grandparents, but discerning listeners who think of themselves as people with “good taste” in music—will not enjoy it."

Marsh avoids describing the loudness and noisiness and instead focuses on how polarizing the loudness and noisiness is. Based on the above average score and lack of complaints besides "other people wouldn't like this", it's interesting to see in the final paragraph that there's a reason he doesn't describe the sound in depth: he doesn't actually like it. "I think the album does a lot of really interesting things and has a lot going for it, but it isn’t very much fun to actually listen to." This review gave me a similar feeling: it asks some interesting questions, but isn't very effective in describing anything in particular about the music. I wanted him to take a risk and tell me why, regardless of what most people would think, this music is potentially worth listening to.

This review has almost no opinion, and yet I still found it worth reading. Hmm...

Holy Snark

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When Calum Marsh sat down to review electro-house duo MSTRKRFT's (mastercraft) new album, Fist of God, he must have been overwhelmed with disdain. I'll admit that I was offended by the godawful album cover, but this guy is seriously pissed that this music even exists. So instead of articulating why the music itself is so bad, he projects his anger onto the subculture of hipsterdom that supposedly surrounds it by writing a sardonic screenplay type thing.

I appreciated the inventiveness of reviewing an album with a script, but after reading it, I have no idea what the album sounds like. However, I CAN tell you that "The only people who like MSTRKRFT are these samey hipsters. They do lots of coke and read VICE and wear nothing but American Apparel and listen to shitty music like this." With all the snobbish judgment about stereotypes of people that might listen to this album, there's no room for descriptions of the actual sounds on the album. The only ones you get are "hollow and dull" and "They want to be like Daft Punk," which doesn't even count. His bottom line is that the fans of MSTRKRFT suck, and therefore the music sucks.

In terms of consumer advocacy, this review fails pretty badly. But he does bring up an interesting idea about suspending one's standards for things intended to be mindless fun. The idea being that "anything which is aware of its own vacuity and overall dumbness is suddenly and completely exempt from any criticism of it being just that." And it's even more interesting based on the amount of self-awareness this review has, with Calum's imaginary friend asking him at one point, "I’m just wondering why you didn’t just write a few paragraphs about Fist Of God, commenting on its homogeneity and blandness, attacking it for sounding dull and boring and vacuous and so on, rather than writing this script thing, whatever it is, and barely talking about the music on the album at all."

Is his review exempt from the usual functions of criticism because it avoids those goals? It's not informative nor does it give me a good idea of whether or not I should spend my money/time. The (purposeful?) irony is that the only real reason to read this review is for the simple entertainment it provides in the roasting of hipsters.

But seriously, look at how ugly that cover is.

The beginnings of an untitled final

In an impressive display of awareness, the Recording Industry Association of America, the music industry's legislative arm that sues the pants off dead grandmothers for alleged "copyright infringement", finally ceased taking music fans to court in December 2008 after realizing that legal battles were an ineffective deterrent and didn't resolve the problem whatsoever. If the recession is making mortgage payments a struggle, it's hard to imagine being able to hand over $4 million in copyright infringement fees. As the RIAA pursues other avenues to bust music pirates, the labels are still left struggling to find ways to get people to pay for music in a culture that has already embraced the idea of music being something you collect in large volumes, and trade freely with your friends.

File-sharing between computers has been around since the IBM heyday of the 80's, but broadband internet and the seminal peer-to-peer program Napster familiarized the mainstream with the MP3 like never before. Music became an all-you-can-eat digital buffet, and independent web sites like Oink's Pink Palace offered a library more comprehensive than any record store on earth, in any format, and at no cost. The unprecedented digital model was more efficient than record stores, it was powered by music fans, and, well, it was free. How do you beat free?

Obviously the labels were feeling a bit threatened, so the RIAA launched a legal assault on 35,000 music pirates over the next 5 years, employing illegal investigative methods, harassment, and impersonation to bully everyone from 4 year old girls to stroke victims. PR disasters such as these helped paint the music industry as a corporation of greedy, malicious, and ignorant dinosaur-thugs who couldn't understand fan's attempts to rebel against the outdated structure of the entertainment industry.

The unprecedented amount of control the internet offers over music is tantalizing because it shifts power back to the fans and makes it possible for people to listen to, learn about, and share music they might otherwise never hear. A survey by Yankelovich Partners for the Digital Media Association found that about half of the music fans in the United States turn to the Internet to search for artists they don't hear on local radio stations. If the range of one's music choices is limited to homogenized Top 40 radio and the meager selection of overpriced CDs at Wal-Mart, is it really any wonder that people want to expand their options and give themselves access to what's really out there?

Apparently, the answer is yes. Instead of capitalizing on the thrilling new possibilities technology afforded them, the "Big Four" (Universal, Sony, Warner, EMI) have refused to alter their business models to work with changes in the marketplace, instead pointing fingers and blaming music piracy for lost sales. Now the industry's ship is in the middle of the Atlantic and it's sinking. For the past eight years, CD sales have continually plummeted while digital downloads, both legal and illegal, have flourished.

The economic stormclouds of 2009 only magnify the main argument of the immoral music thieves against the evil oligarchy of major record labels: music is too expensive. Complaints about overpriced CDs (and the absurd amounts of money harmless music fans can be fined for copyright violations) have never felt more real and urgent. Despite CDs being approximately 25% cheaper than they were in 2000, fans and labels cannot see eye-to-eye anymore.

After the industry walloped on their heads with lawsuits, conquered and crippled their favorite online resources, imposed clumsy and ineffective protection technology on their still overpriced music, fans lost all trust in the industry as an entity that cared about their interests. There is no longer the two-way trust relationship that existed in the 90's between fan and retailer.

Paying $20 for a CD was acceptable because the customer could believe in the fact that they were getting a high quality product, complete with liner notes and album artwork. Distributors were willing to put the time and effort into such quality releases based on the assurance that their customers weren't online stealing their product. Then the aggressive push of technology combined with the arrogant response from the industry left music fans to choose between bending over to the whims of major labels or becoming a criminal. And instead of popular music getting a bit more adventurous and experimental due to the influx of new music suddenly available online, the decrease in sales caused label executives to only properly promote safe, easy acts they know have a better chance of selling, such as The Jonas Brothers.

So now that sales are in the toilet, artists and businessmen will have to engage in a musical survival of the fittest. How do you get anyone to pay for your music if it's available online? Aside from releasing great music, the answer seems to be incentives. English rock band Radiohead embraced this new, digital platform and decided to self-release their last record, In Rainbows online with a "pay-what-you-want-to" pricing scheme that allowed people to acquire the music while paying what they ultimately thought it to be worth. Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails have been giving fans incentives that can't be replicated online, such as CDs that change color after being heated up in a CD player. Even a band as huge as U2 took extra steps...

Realizing that the determination of fans to share music is stronger than the determination of corporations to stop it.

Musical Evolution

Save for vocal harmonies reminiscent of the Beach Boys, Animal Collective have created nine albums in nine years that sound like nothing else ever recorded. Through unrelenting experimentation they have become the progenitors of lo-fi fairy-tale pop, formless noise soundscapes, and tribal psychedelic-folk. With their latest album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, AC have embraced the low-end punch of hip-hop, the hypnotic repetition of house, and the euphoric infectiousness of pop to create something wholly unique once again.

 

The song structures are based on expanding and contracting loops and samples played under the animated and versatile vocal interactions of members nicknamed Avey Tare and Panda Bear. Aural wonders such as the waterlogged rumblings that start "Bluish" or the 8-bit Galaga cascades that stutter across "Daily Routine" create an atmosphere for a pulsing rhythm to swell up in as the dual vocalists leap over each other in soaring melody. The electronic snippets of sound evoke utopian dream-worlds, such as the mystical chirping forest in "In the Flowers".

 

Gone are the slow drones and jittery chords, replaced with layers of upbeat, propulsive percussion and sunshine drenched harmonies. The balance between experimental tendencies and pop conventions has been found, creating a refreshingly eclectic sound with instant appeal. This is the apotheosis of the Collective's ever-increasing pop sensibilities; the two vocalists bounce and breeze in saccharine swirls and soaring anthems while jaunty loops expand and mutate around them. Heavy reverb lends to the sensation that some of the sounds are being transmitted from underwater, which complements the dense production and thick, chugging bass.

 

There's a reason this album is named after an outdoor concert venue in Maryland -- it needs to be blasted, preferably with colossal, organ-rumbling bass. Like any good concert, these songs are meant to be felt, providing blissful physical catharsis through explosions of euphoria. The deep bass and handclaps of "My Girls" climaxes several times with a cymbal rush and ecstatic "Waoo!" that feels like jumping off a pier as a child. Repetition creates tension that can only be relieved by vocal chants and howls.

 

The strong beats weaved throughout give the album a coherence and playability that make it easy to put on repeat. But listening closely to the lyrics reveals a refreshing humanity in their desire for the simple pleasures in life -- a home for one's family, stable friends, shared happiness. In the resplendent album closer "Brothersport", Panda Bear encourages his brother in the wake of their father's death by urging him to "Open up your throat/You've got so much inside/Let it all come out". The beat becomes increasingly joyous, and the infectiousness and positivity of the entire album culminates as the whole thing comes to a close. 

 

What's perhaps most impressive is AC's love for music that has allowed them to continually innovate new sounds over this past decade. They have honed their aesthetic on this album with a clarity of vision, sense of humanity, and staggering creativity that feels rare in the music industry today. Music this fresh and uplifting feels like a blessing.