…or perhaps it’s my Total Crap Sensitivity Syndrome (TCSS) acting up again.  Whatever it is, it’s raging like a Californian wildfire at the news that:

~ “Donnie Darko” will get a sequel - not written or directed by original writer/director Richard Kelly, and not starring Jake Gyllenhaal (because of course, Donnie died at the end of the first movie.  oops, spoiler alert!).

~ “Point Break” will get a sequel - 17+ years later.  (”Gentlemen, I’d like the motto for our movie studio to be: ‘We strike while the iron is room temperature.  Because hey, have you ever struck hot iron?  It sparks!  It’s really dangerous!’  Whaddaya think?”)  Keanu Reeves will not appear, but Patrick Swayze (or at least his character) is featured in the script.

~ “Dances With Wolves” will get a sequel - without star/director Kevin Coster.  Viggo Mortensen steps in to fill the lead role Costner played (why, Viggo?  Just call up Cronenberg and put a few more projects with him in development, will ya?).

Next summer I bet we get “Mitchell 2,” starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Mitchell, with Joe Don Baker making a sweet cameo as Mitchell’s drunken, odiferous father.  It takes a rare confluence of terrible events to make me say this, Diane, but I almost wish the Screen Actors Guild WOULD go on strike.  Would I sacrifice half of next season of “Lost” to make “Donnie Darko 2″ go away?  I just might.

Diane,

I write this from Jacksonville, FL.  Today is the last day of a four-day training exercise.  Tonight, I will take two planes from Jacksonville to Detroit to Indianapolis.  Final touch-down: 10:30 pm.  Feel free to meet me at the airport, Diane - I’ll be the guy with the hollow thousand-yard stare, burying his face in a Cinnabon as big as a guinea pig.

Jacksonville has had its ups and downs.  What follows is an itemized list of both. 

Ups:

~ Got to see a baseball game on a warm but not too humid evening, surrounded by soused locals and swooping seagulls.  It was a hell of a thing.  Incidentally, if you’re going to see a ballgame and you don’t care much for baseball, make it minor league.  There’s a lot more scoring and a lot less working of the pitch count.

~ Ate own weight at a great barbecue joint, and simultaneously learned that Southerners ordering BBQ pork will sometimes specify what cut they want.  “Outside cut” for instance means mostly the “bark” on the outside of the pig, and it is chopped rather than sliced.  Not only do they ask for this, Diane, but the waitresses are very accomodating of it.

~ Uhhhh.

Yes, that’s it: four days, and I truly enjoyed myself for about four non-consecutive hours.

–

Downs:

~ Ate own weight in almost everything imaginable.  Own weight in fast food fajitas at the Indy airport (grade: B-).  Own weight in sandwiches and fries, twice.  Own weight in pizza for lunch one day.  Own weight in candy and Coke to keep my eyes open during all-day training sessions.  Own weight in (allegedly) Cajun, (allegedly) spicy snack mix.  Did NOT eat own weight in fruits, vegetables, or any other remotely healthy thing, however.  Current physical status: sludgy, pudgy, fucked up, pork barrel.  I will need to be rolled on to the plane this afternoon.

~ This training that I have already mentioned a couple times?  Diane, that shit was BORING.  Boooorrrrr-ing.  So very dull and purposeless.  Each day we started early and ended late; and one day we brought lunch in and trained through lunch.  Bosses who do this sort of thing should be locked in the training room at the end of the day with venomous snakes and enraged wolverines.  And a big, open bag of poop.

~ Drove by a restaurant called this: Ying’s Chinee Takee Outee.  No further comment.

~ For a brief period of time at the ballgame, sat in front of drunken, constantly-shouting Boomhauer.  This was surreal.  I wasn’t even sure if he was rooting for the guy at bat to succeed or fail; all I know is, he felt very strongly about it.

~ Missed “Lost” on account of planned bonding activities.  I know Gordon and Albert aren’t big fans of the show, Diane, but they need to respect my personal entertainment choices outside of company time.  Now it’ll be at least another day before I know if Jacob is actually Jack’s dad, if Michael or Ben ends up in the coffin, or if a Kate/Claire/Juliet/Sun lesbi-throwdown is as hot as I think it would be.  (Diane, when I get back to the home office, remind me to e-mail Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse with my list of suggestions for improving the show.) 

~ Missed my woman.  (Awwwwww!)

So that’s it, Diane.  Should I ever set foot in this mediocre city again, I resolve to eat more salads and less french fries, and fake an illness on days 2-4 that allows me to spend a lot of time in a zen state watching TV in the hotel room.  I only got to see the first half of “My Super Ex-Girlfriend,” for Christ’s sake - how will I ever find out how damn stupid that movie was going to turn out to be?

On second thought, maybe it’s good that other people occasionally run my life.

Diane,

Good TV shows turning into bad (or lesser, or just different) TV shows is a phenomenon that all us TV watchers should be familiar with.  It’s so common, in fact, that we have an irritating catchphrase for it.  You know the one I mean.  The internet hasn’t been able to go more than four or five paragraphs without invoking it for the last few years.  (It kind of makes me want to go around jamming forks into the webbing between people’s typin’ fingers.)

I think it’s clear that the backlash is on for this expression.  A Yahoo! search for “jump the shark has jumped the shark” returned 649 results; a search for the inversion “has jump the shark jumped the shark” came up with another 26, including an article that ran in Esquire under that title.  So some meaningful but small percentage of us is already sick of it.  But more to the point, “jump the shark,” as catchy and concise as it may be, is not the best way to describe what happens to a show you love to make you no longer love it so.  I propose as an alternative: X turned into Bizarro-X.  (Where X is the show that has suddenly lost its way.)

You see, Diane, I think this is exactly what happens.  At some point the various external pressures exerting themselves on a show build up to the point that the show can no longer resist.  It collapses, and then is reborn as something… else.  Maybe it’s producer and network meddling; maybe it’s the actors getting bored and reinventing their characters; maybe it’s writing staff turnover; maybe it’s the core creative force shifting his or her focus over to newer and fresher projects (hello, Matt Groening and Joss Whedon).  Whatever combination it is exactly, the end result is always the Bizarro-show.  It looks and acts a lot like the show it used to be, but somehow it’s fundamentally different.  It says “hello” when it means “goodbye.”

The best live example is - of course - “The Simpsons.”  (Excuse me for one moment while I divert into a tangential rant.  The response to this example is going to be split between vigorous head nodding of agreement, and finger wagging of dissent topped with a blast of hot air.  The hot air will consist almost entirely of the phrase “it’s still better than 99% of the crap on TV.”  I hate this idea down to its loathsome molecules.  For one thing, it’s probably false.  But more importantly, it’s a self-negating argument.  You think that almost all of what is on TV is “crap,” which - without digging too heavily into the semantics of the metaphor - is most assuredly not worth watching at all because it sucks so hard; and yet your argument in favor of the new “Simpsons” is that it’s “still” [which I take to mean "at least" or more precisely "at minimum"] better than said worthless excrement?  Well bully for the new “Simpsons”!  What a precipitous summit it has scaled!  I shall reprogram my DVR forthwith!  …As you can see, this argument is fundamentally braindead.  “The Simpsons” is still better than “Deal or No Deal” means there are two shows I won’t be watching, only I hate one of them a little more than the other; even crap can be graduated.)  Ahem… YES, “The Simpsons” long ago lost its way.  The exact date differs depending on who you ask, but most people of merit and intellect realize it was before the season numbering got into double digits.  The show that now calls itself “The Simpsons” has superficially similar but atomically various characters from the ones that made it famous.  Its plotlines and jokes hew closer to what is now known as “The Family Guy” Standard: random, grotesque, pop culture-regurgitating (but not “satirizing” or “skewering”).  “The Simpsons” has become The Bizarro-Simpsons.  And fittingly, when it means to say “hello,” it actually says “goodbye.”  We concur; we wave our hand sadly and turn away.  (If this were “The Family Guy” or a new “Simpsons” episode, this would cue “The Lonely Man Theme” from the old “Hulk” show.  And our viewers would chuckle knowingly because hey, they recognize that music!  Funny!  This same comedic concept drives the inexplicable “Date Movie”/”Epic Movie”/”Scary Movie” meatwagon.)

It’s unpleasant when a show becomes its own Bizarro-version.  It makes an astute viewer uncomfortable.  To bring up another meme the internet has beaten into the ground, Bizarro-shows sit squarely in The Uncanny Valley.  They resemble a good show in most ways but something is a little off, a little alien, about them.  So we hear Homer explain that a panda bear raped him and we shudder with horror that seems to emanate from a primal place within.  Homer doesn’t get raped by panda bears.  Why does this character who looks and sounds like Homer act like Peter Griffin?  Let Peter Griffin get bear-raped - seriously, let him get bear-raped - but for god’s sake, leave Homer alone.  (Cue “Leave Britney alone!” guy joke.  Viewer recognizes and laughs.  Funny!)

I have said (twice now, I believe - not gonna go back and check) that when a show becomes its own Bizarro-version, it has lost its way.  This is a helpful metaphor.  Think of a show like a locomotive.  It’s common to say that when a show becomes bad or less watchable than it was before that it has “gone off the rails,” a common-enough train metaphor for the disastrous loss of what was once positive forward momentum.  But I think what has actually happened is an unanticipated and unwanted track switch.  Someone threw the lever dealie that flipped it over to another set of rails, and now instead of going to some place awesome (like Vegas) we’re going someplace similar-looking but crappy (like Atlantic City).  We end up at CiCi’s instead of Giordano’s.  And it’s only after we’ve choked down a plateful of $2.99 buffet pizza that we realize, hey - something ain’t right.

At that point, Diane, the choice is yours.  Stay at CiCi’s and eat crap, even if it’s better than 99% of the other crap; or tell the waitstaff to go fuck itself and go on an epic quest to find Giordano’s.  When you get there, trust me - it will have been worth the walk.

Diane,

Variety has the story on this.  I have little to add except that my hope that he’ll make an adaptation which is both reasonably true to the source material and in keeping with the look and feel of the previous movies. 

…my job is merely sapping my will to live.

Diane,

Today I bring you a silly trifle of a post, but one with perhaps bottomless usefulness.  This is the Scale of Rock, a standard by which you can determine how much something does, or does not, rock.  Or rawk.  Or RAAWWWWK!

I will spoil the grand reveal here and tell you that the hardest-rocking song ever written is “Back in Black” by AC/DC.  It’s not the best song, or even the best AC/DC song - in fact, it falls in line behind about 15 others from the Bon Scott era - but it is three minutes or so of ass-moving, Jesus-punching, motherfucking rock ‘n roll like none other, with a guitar riff so fat and nasty that you can almost forgive the guy playing it for wearing ridiculous shorts and being named Angus.  Yes, “Back in Black” is our standard.  If you disagree, you may go fuck yourself.  I’ll wait here.

(Taps foot impatiently.)

(Hums a little tune.)

Done yet?  Done fucking yourself?  Good - let’s get to the rest of this list.  Everything here is rated on a scale of 0.00 to 1.00 Back in Blacks; only “Back in Black” can score a full 1.00 Back in Blacks, but it’s fun for everybody else to try.  Also note that we will not be judging anything that is not actual rock ‘n roll - sure, a lot of classical music and lawn ornaments score 0.00 Back in Blacks, but we won’t be larding this list with them.

1.00 BIBs: AC/DC, “Back in Black”   Simply the rockingest song there is.  If you don’t feel that guitar riff, you have no rock in your soul.  Or any of your other places.  (You may still have a little rock in your kidneys.)

0.99 BIBs: Metallica, “One” - just the “I cannot live, I cannot die” part   It’s hard to gauge a song like this as a whole; like “Stairway to Heaven,” too much of its running time is devoted to mournful guitar picking and mayqueens and such.  But if you were to cut “One” in half (in which case, it would be called “Zero Point Five”) and just listen to the thrash ending part, this song rocks out loud.  Even people who have never banged their heads against the stage in their lives would be throwing some hair around.

0.97 BIBs: The Rolling Stones, “Gimme Shelter”   I have argued many a time that “Gimme Shelter” is the definitive rock ‘n roll song - the essence of rock.  And I’m sure Martin Scorsese would agree with me, to judge by the entirely awesome opening to “The Departed.”  Interestingly, this song doesn’t rock as much as it is possible to rock, but it comes damn close.  I guess a little bit of rock has to be compromised to make a truly awesome song.

0.96 BIBs: Jimi Hendrix, “Voodoo Child”/”Purple Haze”/”Foxy Lady”   This slot could be occupied by any of about ten Hendrix numbers, but I chose three familiar and gigantic ones.  For me the one that slightly edges the others is “Voodoo Child” thanks to that guitar riff that sounds like the entire history of blues compressed into one wad and then swallowed by Satan.

0.94 BIBs: Led Zeppelin, “Kashmir”   Just a redonkulously huge riff.  However, it loses 0.03 BIBs because Zep allowed P Diddy to ruin the song with his excruciating “sampling” of it.  And Jimmy Fucking Page even helped him perform it live.  Ye gods.

0.90 BIBs: Soundgarden, “Outshined”   This is the biggest rock song the alterna-grunge generation of musicians ever spat out, but they still managed to slightly hobble the rock by putting it in such a weird meter.  C’mon, Soundgarden: 4/4 time is your friend.

0.86 BIBs: Guns ‘n Roses, “Welcome to the Jungle”   Kind of a weird test case for our scale, “Welcome to the Jungle” presents the GnR paradox in full.  Clearly the song rocks like an earthquake, but it also has a surprising amount of funk in its veins.  GnR was a bit of a dance band throughout “Appetite,” which compromises just how hard they can rock (see also: nu metal).  In the final analysis, it’s quite an accomplishment that a song as groovy as “Jungle” can also score so highly on a list like this one.

0.83 BIBs: Mahavishnu Orchestra, “Birds of Fire”   This one has the Outshined Conundrum, in that the time signature is just too damn weird for the song to really rock.  But - damn, just listen to it!  John McLaughlin is the only guy on the planet who could turn that groove into an almost Hendrixian experience.

0.80 BIBs: Link Wray, “Rumble”   a.k.a. that instrumental song from “Pulp Fiction” that everybody recognizes within three guitar strums.  This song almost single-handedly brought the nasty into rock ‘n roll, for which we all owe it a debt of gratitude.

0.75 BIBs: Black Sabbath, “Iron Man”   This song rocks somewhat less hard in practice than in memory, but it still rocks.  Re-watch that trailer for “Iron Man” and tell me you don’t get chills and the urge to smoke a bowl when the robo-voice comes on at the end.  “I… am… IRON MAN!”  Hell yes you are, robo-voice.

0.70 BIBs: Aerosmith, “Walk This Way”   Until Guns ‘n Roses came along, this was as rockin’ as a toe-tapping dance number could get.

0.68 BIBs: Ice Cube, “Wrong N***a to Fuck Wit”   Yes, Diane, I totally wussed out and starred out the N word.  Get over it.  Anyway, this song is one of the hardest rap songs ever laid to tape.  The beats sound like bombs going off and Cube sounds like he wants to kill everybody - the police, white people, the manager trying to get him to do “Are We There Yet?”  Which reminds me:

R.I.P. Ice Cube, 1969 - 2005.  He Used To Be Hard

.063 BIBs: The Clash, “London Calling”   After “Gimme Shelter” this is the best song on this list, so it pains me to rank it firmly in the middle of the pack, rock-wise.  But this is really about right.  The god’s-honest truth is that the Clash were an awesome band who rarely rocked very hard, certainly not as hard as the Ramones or the Pistols - and yes, punk purists, I have heard their first album.  A lot.  Anyway, this is one of their heaviest songs.  It’s not so much the actual riff or the rhythm section as the whole dark, apocalyptic vibe - a vibe, incidentally, which works so well in “Gimme Shelter” too.  (And now you know the secret to writing a song that Agent Dale Cooper will love.) 

.060 BIBs: Weezer, “Tired of Sex”   Weezer hit maximum rock ‘n roll (for Weezer) on this awesome lead-off track to “Pinkerton.”  “Pinkerton,” by the way, is their most rock and most spectacular album.  Naturally, it flopped and they started cranking out songs ready-made for inclusion in Kidz Bop CDs.  Sigh.

.050 BIBs: Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, “Refugee”   Just seems about right, doesn’t it?  Tom Petty makes a perfect halfway point on any scale measuring anything. 

.046 BIBs: Phil Collins, “In the Air Tonight”   This song spends 2/3 of its length noodling around atmospherically, which only makes it all the more fantastic when that enormous drum fill comes in and announces, “Ladies and gentleman - this song will NOW START TO ROCK!”  The entire rest of Phil’s solo career added together only comes to about .042, but this one song is a pretty solid entry in the pantheon of rock.

0.40 BIBs: Dead Kennedys, “Nazi Punks Fuck Off!”   This song is a little too frantic and ridiculous to qualify as pure rock, which is true of hardcore in general.  So let this be the standard: hardcore can rock to about 40% of maximum AC/DC capacity.  The punk community won’t be happy to hear this news, but fuck ‘em - they never liked Angus anyway.  You can also throw “Filler” by Minor Threat into this bracket.

0.35 BIBs: The Monkees, “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone”   No Monkee outing can venture higher up this list, but in truth, this is a high accolade for anything Monkee-affiliated.  And really, within “Steppin’ Stone” lurks a truly nasty rock song that just requires less delicate hands to bring it out.  This point has been proven repeatedly by the many cover versions that cascaded forth over the years.

0.30 BIBs: U2, “Vertigo”   There it is, Bono: the hardest you’ll ever rock.  Hope you sold a lot of iPods.

0.27 BIBs: Radiohead, whole career

0.22 BIBs: Guided by Voices, “Hot Freaks”   See, indie rock snobs: this is why classic rock people think you’re a bunch of pasty, fey goobers.  This is as hard as your favorite band ever rocks!  And it’s not very hard at all.  I give ‘em credit for that weird, druggy vibe though - that’s pretty rock ‘n roll.

0.20 BIBs: Rick Derringer, “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo”   I don’t know what rocks the least about this alleged classic rock song: the hoochie koo part, the “rock AND roll” part, the comma between those two parts, or the total white guy groove it has going throughout.  I hate this song.

0.11 BIBs: Lenny Kravitz   No matter how hard he tries, Lenny’s idea of rock sounds utterly plastic and fake, like someone trying to pass off a Twinkie as a fine pastry.  “Are You Gonna Go My Way,” in isolation, would rank about .33 on this scale, but when considering the man in toto, this is as good as he’s gonna get.  Which reminds me:

0.10 BIBs: Toto, “Africa”   The very essence of soft, adult contempo rock.  It preserves exactly 10% of the essense of the pure stuff. 

0.06 BIBs: Billy Joel, “We Didn’t Start the Fire”   You can feel Joel trying to work up some rock lather throughout this “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” ripoff, but he never quite gets there.  This song is the equivalent of a fifteen minute bad handjob that ends with the guy waving the girl off due to boredom/chafing.

0.04 BIBs: The Cardigans, “Lovefool”   Great, tremendously sexy song.  Despite that, and the fact that it is ostensibly a “pop/rock” tune, ”Lovefool” does not rock… not at all.  No one has ever been motivated to throw horns when that adorable Swedish chick sings, “I can’t care ’bout anything but yooouuuu.”  In fact, despite their affinity for Black Sabbath, the Cardigans almost never rock.

0.01 BIBs: Soul Asylum, “Runaway Train”   It pains me to recall that this band used to be good.  It also pains me to recall that the lead single off this same album was “Somebody to Shove,” which was a great song and totally rocked, and yet “Runaway Septic Disaster” was their most enduring hit and completely overshadowed its predecessor.  If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be sitting here with my eyes closed listening to “Cartoon” and “Sometime to Return” on infinite loop.

0.00 BIBs: Don Henley any time he does his tough guy voice   This ball started rolling when the Eagles did a fairly convincing piece of work in “Life in the Fast Lane,” which is the only exception to this rule (”Life in the Fast Lane” scores 0.2 BIBs).  Forever thereafter, Henley was strangely convinced that he could inject a little grain, a little sneer into his voice, and it would sell whatever song he was singing as a kickass, rockin’ good time.  Henley was very wrong, as proved repeatedly by the likes of “All She Wants to Do is Dance” and “Dirty Laundry.”  But the worst came recently with the Eagles song “Get Over It,” featuring totally rockin’ lyrics like: “You bitch about the present and blame it on the past/I’d like to find your inner child and kick its little ass!”  Yeah Don: it turns out that “bitch” and “ass” are not very tough-guy curse words any more, and bragging about beating up children doesn’t make you dangerous.  (Except to children.)

Diane,

I rarely use these communications to pimp one particular album, band, movie, director, actor, author, etc.  It just seems like a blandly straightforward thing to do, and this FBI agent would rather zigzag a bit.  Today, however, I am going to make an exception.  And fittingly, it’s being made on behalf of a band that has a serious zigzagging addiction.

I found out about Ulver (the name is Norwegian for “wolves”) during my heavy metal explorations of the last couple years.  The easiest metal for me to comprehend is low, rumbling, full-throttle stuff.  The hardest is melodic, screechy, and tinny - what is known to the metal community as orthodox black metal.  For a long time I thought that’s what black metal was all about (also sub-Kiss makeup and spiky armbands) so I just steered clear of it.  Eventually my curiosity got the better of me, and I started asking the old-timers if there was any black metal that someone who’s more into Slayer and Dismember (slay! dismember! no commands are more metal!) might appreciate.  They chewed it up and came back to me with lists.  I got some recommendations.  I got some Ulver.

Ulver’s long discography starts in 1994 with the release of “Bergtatt,” which is now my favorite black metal album, and the best argument I can make in favor of the genre.  It’s an eerily beautiful piece of work, with long and meandering melodies and clear, ghostly vocal harmonies.  That’s right - actual singing.  There is a little extreme metal growling throughout, but the predominant vocal flavor is closer to Scandinavian folk music or Gregorian chant.  “Bergtatt” rarely tries to go faster or be more eeeevil than its contemporaries from the likes of Immortal and Darkthrone; it’s content to lull you into feeling like you’re in a forest, dreaming.  Or dreaming of being in a forest.  Or something foresty and dreamy.  In any event, it’s a remarkable album that completely defied my expectations.

After “Bergtatt,” Ulver got weird.  First they released “Kveldssanger,” an all-acoustic, all-not-metal album of lovely folk tunes.  It maintains some of the dark and haunting aspects of “Bergtatt” but doesn’t even remotely try to ROCK.  Quite a bit of the album is nothing but chiming acoustic guitars supporting a dark, sonorous cello.  For a “metal” band this was a hell of a twist - but nothing like what was to come.  More on that momentarily.  Ulver followed up their folk album with “Nattens Madrigal,” a leap into utterly orthodox black metal.  It’s fast, it’s shrieky, it’s extremely poorly produced - it’s the Ulver album I have the least interest in, though to many black metallers it’s the high point of their discography.  Its biggest problem, in my opinion, is that it preserves so little of the loveliness of its two predecessors.  There are melodies in the guitar lines but they are playing too quickly and sound like they’re coming out of seriously overdriven 1-inch speakers.  And the band does away entirely with clean, melodic singing, which proved both before and after this release to be one of their best weapons.

In any event, after “Nattens Madrigal” is where Ulver started really throwing curveballs.

For one thing, they gave up on being a metal band.  They went from their most metal release to one of their least.  “Themes From William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” is some sort of dark ambient/electronic/gothic music, utterly sans distorted guitars and rock drumming.  In place of those things, Ulver used - well, let me refer to the musician credits: “Programming.”  “Generation.”  “Cables, wires, & sounds.”  “Vinyl scratching”?!?  “Say it ain’t so, Ulver!” was the reaction from their fanbase, and I can only conjecture that Ulver’s general reaction was, “Sorry, dudes.  It is so.”  In fact, their entire subsequent output has restated and underscored this sentiment repeatedly.

Post-”Nattens Madrigal,” Ulver has turned out six full length albums and a handful of EPs.  Among the albums, three were soundtracks for films (”Themes from…” was the first of these).  Most of these releases were heavily electronic; many were slow or completely ambient, and a couple were completely instrumental.  “Lyckantropen Themes” is an excellent example of this - a voiceless electronic/ambient voyage through auditory shadows.  On the other hand, their second-most-recent album “Blood Inside” is a brash avant garde-pop-rock-electronica affair with clear but “difficult” melodies and a notable kinship to the work of Mr. Bungle and Mike Patton’s other releases.  It has heavier drumming, brass sections, and at least one sudden veer into jazz that sounds like early Sun Ra.  I can only imagine that anyone who had heard only “Nattens Madrigal” and then jumped straight to “Blood Inside” would suffer from rapid-onset cranial explosionism. 

Their latest release is “Shadows of the Sun,” another change of direction from the noisy, complicated “Blood Inside.”  “Shadows” is a smeary, semi-ambient album of vocal chamber music.  Deep, dark vocal harmonies sing lyrics like, “The sun is far away/It goes in circles/Someone dies/Someone lives,” over a minimalistic bed of piano and synth washes.  No drums, no driving synthetic bleeps and blips - this is nearly New Age Ulver.  Except it’s a whole lot more melancholy than anything Windham Hill ever put out.

If you want to hear the gamut of Ulver, try these two MySpace pages: black metal-era Ulver; the rest of Ulver.  The first has two songs each from “Bergtatt” and “Nattens Madrigal.”  I can’t recommend the latter album but the former I think is kind of brilliant.  The second is a sampling of different, later albums, including the track that convinced me to buy “Shadows of the Sun,” called “Funebre.”  Also check out “In the Red” from “Blood Inside,” which might be the single best taste of how strange Ulver can be.

Diane,

Just a quick note to let you know that the fifth copy of the Sweat Band LP I bought plays skip-free, and I’m listening to my pristine rip of it right now.  Killing spree averted!

Thesis: Many music subgenres uniquely identify with a particular classic movie monster.  By elucidating on these connections we can begin to more fully understand the essence of both.

Diane,

I rarely revisit an old subject (wink wink), but I feel like I’ve done you a great disservice.  In my post ripping the LP a new one, I somehow neglected to mention the biggest problem with the format.

Which I will get to in a second.  First you get to read this little tale of hardship and woe.

Near the beginning of February, I was surfing the web and noticed that one of my favorite P-Funk spinoff albums, the self-titled, only release by Sweat Band, had been given a new vinyl reissue.  Despite my earlier, voluminous protestations, I do own a record player and a healthy stack of LPs and 7-inches.  And since the Sweat Band Japanese import CD is long out of print and goes for $200 a pop on eBay, I thought, “What the hey, ten bucks for a vinyl reissue of this baby sounds great to me.”  (What a naive fool I was.)

I ordered a copy from Dusty Groove, some awesome motherfuckers from this agent’s old HQ locale, Chicago.  Dusty Groove are keeping the flame for vinyl alive.  Good on them.  I have been delighted with their service in the past and picked up a fresh new copy of the self-titled album by Quazar, which I was very happy with.  This new Sweat Band, though - not so much.  My inaugural spin was in my music/computer room, me sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the record player as my PC recorded its every note.  All was well for about 30 seconds.  Maybe 35.

And then the skipping started.

A lot of people associate skipping with the old cliche of a “broken record,” meaning something just repeating ad nauseum until you bump the needle forward a few grooves.  (See also: this blog on the subject of movies being remade.)  These are known as backward skips, because a scratch or other damage to the groove sends the needle backward.  In my experience though, the most common variety is the forward skip.  I don’t know why that is, but it seems to be all I ever run into.  I own at least five or six pieces of vinyl with some very annoying forward skips in them - small chunks of song just disappear.  Well, less than a minute into “Hyper Space” on side 1 of “Sweat Band,” it started forward skipping.  And it did it two or three times in pretty short order.

I was calm, I was clear-headed.  I took off the record and looked at it lovingly.  I tenderly caressed it with an old, soft t-shirt to remove any hairs or crudlings.  I looked for visible scratches - on this NEW piece of vinyl - and found none.  Satisfied with my efforts, I put it back on again.  And the fucking thing skipped again, in the same places as before.

I contacted Dusty Groove.  They were awesome.  They held a replacement copy for me and promised to execute the old switcheroo as soon as the first was returned, and they volunteered to cover my postage costs.  I was a very happy customer.  I mailed it back the next day, my card was refunded for shipping, and just a few days later I received copy #2.  I took it out of the shipping box, removed it from the sleeve, and put it on the turntable.

And it fucking skipped just like the previous one did.

“OK,” I said to myself, “This is clearly a manufacturer’s defect of some sort.  I can’t see it so it must have been a problem in the master or something.”  I contacted Dusty Groove and they offered me a refund, which I accepted.  Issue resolved - except now I have no copy of the album I wanted.

My next stop was eBay.  I figured - correctly, as it turned out - that the reissue would drive down prices on the original copies.  A few stubborn sellers were clinging to their $40 Buy It Nows, but most copies of the first press were going for $8 to $10.  Perfect.  I bought one, waited the few days for the auction to end (there were no bidders except me), and then waited a few more days for the album to ship.  It arrived, I put it on - you can see where this is going, can’t you? - and it skipped.  Not during “Hyper Space” - these skips were scattered throughout several other tracks.  I did my clean-and-buff routine on the record with no tangible results.  And I bowed my head in defeat.  But then I raised it in resilience!  The fates were not going to win.

I headed back to eBay and bought used copy of the original pressing #2.  For those keeping track, this is the FOURTH copy in total of the album that I bought.  I waited for it to ship to me.  I took it out of the box, etc.  And - wait for it! oh yes, motherfucker! - it skipped.  Several skips, various tracks, the usual routine.  Cleaned it, buffed it, no results. 

At this point I was almost a broken man.  I’d invested about $45 on copies of this album (over half of which has since been refunded to me), received it to my house four different times, and didn’t have one clean, playable copy to show for it.  Nearly entirely daunted, I turned to my last refuge: GEMM.com, eBay’s music-only evil twin.  I ordered myself an original pressing still in shrinkwrap, never opened or played.  I’m still waiting for it - I’ll report back soon.

But in the meantime, as I waited for Sweat Band LP #5, Bloodstone LP #1 showed up on my doorstep.  Bloodstone is an obscure Swedish death metal band whose only album was recently issued on vinyl by the indie/metal label Blood Harvest (a great label who puts out excellent releases and has solid customer service).  After the Sweat Band saga, I was really looking forward to putting on a NEW piece of vinyl that most probably wouldn’t skip on me.  So this evening I played a little online poker, ate a greasy and appalling dinner, and then settled back to listen to/rip the new record.

Maybe you see this coming.  Maybe you are not as stupid as I thought, Diane.  (Just a little joke.  Pardon my seething rage, so briefly directed at you.  It will all make sense momentarily.)

Yep, the new LP skips too.  It has a series of loud pops in track 1, side 1, which is annoying but I can live with it.  But after I ripped all of side 1 and moved on to side 2, the skipping kicked in.  Three or four times in the first song alone.  I was inches away from dismantling my record player and hurling it over the back yard fence for the groundskeeper of the church behind my house to clean up.  I was mere millimeters from snapping the record in half over my knee and slicing open my arteries with the jagged shards that remained.  I was about one thousandth of a micron from going on a killing spree that would result in headlines like, “Clean-cut FBI agent stabs seven with homemade vinyl knives in northside Denny’s.”  I was THIS close, Diane.

Luckily for my wrists and the good patrons of Denny’s, I came to my senses.  I put the record away and calmly e-mailed the proprietor of Blood Harvest, explaining that his record has issues and perhaps he would be so kind as to send me a replacement.

Which will most assuredly skip.  And will most assuredly be the last record I ever buy.

…So that brings me to the neglected biggest single problem with vinyl as an audio format, which is that it is a fragile, ridiculously sensitive piece of FUCKING SHIT, and if I EVER BUY ANOTHER FUCKING RECORD AGAIN, IT WILL BE TOO FUCKING SOON, YOU FUCKING CRAPASS PIECES OF BASTARD PIE.  GodDAMN it.

(Whew.  Feel a bit better now.)