Chris Thomas King Angola review

 

ANGOLA by Chris Thomas King 2020

When an album is named after a notorious US prison, and the first thing you hear as the needle drops is a crowd chanting "George Floyd, George Floyd" to a background of police sirens and rumbling guitar, you know there's a lot of anger here. And anger doesn't always translate into approachable art. 

Fortunately, there's a lot more here than anger; there's pity, and, in a brilliant cover of Dylan's I Shall Be Released, compassion. The Dylan connection is also relevant in that Dylan himself recorded Hurricane, a song that also challenged the institutionalised  racism that we know as the US of A. 

This is not Johnny Cash at Folsom or BB King at Sing-Sing, this is an altogether different event. The album begins, as already noted, with a mash of real-world noises, hip-hop sensibilities and created music centreing on the brutal viral story of George Floyd and moves into a rendition of the US national anthem where CTK channels Hendrix to remind us of Woodstock's famous deconstruction of the Vietnam war. People still, CTK reminds us, have to face off with the Man, the system that dehumanises every one of us, especially people of colour.

Next up is Drenched With Our Blood; in fact just looking at the album's tracklist tells you what's going on here:

 

 

 

 

 

But it's not all doom and gloom. In CTK's hands this becomes an existential crisis full of pathos: 

Why do we do this to each other? What happened to respecting our common humanity? 

In this context, I Shall Be Released is transformed from a moving song about an individual to a song of hope for humankind. In this year of lockdowns and terrors it wells up in our chests and becomes a song of hope for us all.

[swazifiction, October 2020]

Mr Robot: Gnome or KDE? A review.

Mr Robot: the new TV series

There's a moment in the pilot of the upcoming Mr Robot TV series when the protagonist and his future supporter/ antagonist/ nemesis (we don't as yet know exactly how this relationship might pan out) look at each other and have a brief conversation that includes something like "I see you use Gnome. I'm a KDE man myself."

It made me smile (I'm a Gnome man here) and I assumed it was in the show to give Mr Robot some tech credibility, but really I'm not so sure. Later, there's a lot of quick linux scripting to block malicious code, and that's obviously more tech-cred. Yet the more I think about it, "Gnome or KDE?" really is something that we linux guys say to each other. I realise I've had that conversation quite a few times over the years.

The pilot is engaging and full of promise. Elliot is a young programmer by day and hacker by night. He's also deceitful, distrustful and a social misfit; in his isolation his mind is apocalyptic-sharp and he sees through the world system's fronting in a way similar to the premise of the successful Matrix films of yesteryear. It seems he has an overarching desire to destroy what he sees as the facade of the normal, so early on we see how he hacks the overlord of a child porn group and passes on the information to bring the man and his business down, rather than use the info to extort blackmail money. In this, Elliot is a modern-day Robin Hood or Batman, seeking to right wrongs when he can.

But porn sites are small change compared to what the mysterious Mr Robot offers him. This gives the show much potential. Elliot's dysfunctional personality also offers plenty of plot direction and character development.

The pilot is a good start. I'm already hoping part two will be just as good.

Review: Left Behind and The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies

 HERE'S A TURKEY for Christmas: Left Behind, the movie (2014 version). When I saw the trailer for this movie, the combination of promo and the title made me suspect it was an updated remake of the 1995 novel 'Left Behind' by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. But I mostly dismissed the idea because this movie stars Nicholas Cage. You see, I have a copy of this novel and enjoyed reading at the time it was published. It was an instant classic and went on to spawn a complete series of novels. It's essentially a right-wing evangelical church read, but written well enough to grip you even if you're not usually that way inclined. So, Nicholas Cage? Well, it turns out that Nicholas Cage is the best bit of this movie, but the movie is a turkey in exactly the same way that Dan Brown's 'Da Vinci Code' was a great book but a turkey of a movie. Books work in ways that films don't and vice-versa. 'Left Behind' is thin on action but OTT on its message -- from the Bible-thumping mum and the woman in the airport, to the little touches like the fish pendant in the abandoned car, to the good muslim on the plane who has (obviously) been left behind -- simply because it had to be. The trailer and the film are obviously trying to get their message through to more than just the rapturous (sic) community, but in the end I suspect it's only the faithful (sic) who will be its audience. The average parent who buys it, thinking it will be a good family movie, will wish the dvd had been left behind in the shop.  And that's a pity. However, as one character says near the end of the movie, "This is just the beginning"... as with Tom Hanks and Dan Brown's novels, Nicholas Cage and his co-stars are set up for a series here.


The BBC ran their Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies review under the headline, "Is final Hobbit movie a flop?" The resounding answer is No, I saw it yesterday and it's the most impressive use of 3D that I've yet seen -- the death of Smaug, the dragon, is particularly striking (sic) -- but the problem is that the dragon dies very early on in the movie, Of course, the book couldn't just end there, so Tolkein added the Battle of the Five Armies to follow things to their natural conclusions and tie up all the loose ends, etc; but I was rereading my copy of the novel recently and noticed that even Tolkein ran out of plot steam. After all, war is war and battles are battles; there's a limited number of things you can do with them. The entire Battle of the Five Armies (i.e., 75% of this movie) takes only a handful of pages in the book, and, since Bilbo is unconscious during most of it, it is cursorily summarised in a 'Bilbo was told' paragraph or two. So it's visually exciting, fast-paced, violent (but not Tarantino) and great to experience. But don't expect much of a story.

I See Hawks in LA: 'Mystery Drug' Review

I See Hawks In LA Mystery Drug:

I first came across I See Hawks when they released their second album, years ago, but because I live in Swaziland, all I could get hold of were a few songs on the band's website including I See Hawks In LA and Humboldt. I thought they were a neo-Flying Burrito Brothers and told them so. More recently I was in London and found a copy of last year's New Kind of Lonely. I'll be honest; I'm a fan. But, like the Burritos, they're still likely to appeal more to musicians than the general public. (I bought two copies of the Burrito's Gilded Palace of Sin when it was first released and gave one to my brother. He appreciated the gesture but was bemused by the music.) But how can I not like a band who releases songs with lyrics like these:

“Stop driving like an asshole/ You know who you are/ Did you think when you cut me off it would help you go farther? / You’re an accident waiting to happen, a flipped over SUV/ On the 405, at six o’clock, your carcass on TV…. The angels will sing/ sha-la-la, sha-la-la/ he drove like an asshole"?

That's on Mystery Drug. For many bands it might be seen as a cheap throwaway, but it's typical of the band's leftfield approach. The Hawks are listed as Alt. Country, or hippie country and it's rare for a reviewer not to mention the Burritos, but they have this whole other dimension that I call Zen Country, an off-the-wall insight or irreverent comment that lingers long after you've heard it. 

Already I love this album. And when some other driver cuts me off...

Kings of Leon Come Around Sundown snippet

As a huge KOL fan, I should have written a review of the new album Come Around Sundown about eight weeks ago, when I first heard it. This is not that review, just a snippet from the front line.

Mixtapemaestro recently posted a Cee-Lo cover of Radioactive (the new KOL single) on his excellent blog with the comment that the cover makes the KOL original 'irrelevant'. Unfortunately, I hear what he means. I don't particularly like Cee-Lo's version but I hadn't realised before what a great gospel song this could be with the right performance and arrangement. (I'm thinking Sharon Jones or Mavis Staples or even Aretha here.)

Come Around Sundown is KOL's most polished album yet. And to my ears that's the problem. I put the Cee-Lo cover on replay, listened to it ten times or so, and then listened to KOL's original. I got about half-way through when I ejected it and played Aha Shake Heartbreak instead. Now, that's the music I like.