Month: October 2011

Codes and Keys – Death Cab For Cutie

Death Cab is one of the few classic indie bands that has been around since the 90s and managed to not break up yet remain relevant. But that doesn’t mean everything is roses. Let’s face it- the last album, Narrow Stairs, was a borderline nightmare that I couldn’t make up my mind about. Old school Death Cab was nostalgic, unproduced small label fare, charming and catchy. After time the band matured into a vehicle for longing melancholy that elevated them to a timeless status. Then the last album spun the momentum completely around. What would be next?

Underneath The Sycamore
Underneath The Sycamore

Codes and Keys is very happy and upbeat, almost playful. This is more Postal Service and less 2nd generation Death Cab (you can tell I still miss the deep sadness of Transatlanticism and Plans). After two albums it is clear that we have entered a new generation of the group. Beats are lighter and faster and carry an electronic tinge, and Ben Gibbard’s voice is more filtered than ever before.

Quality and variety wise, Codes and Keys is overall better than Narrow Stairs, although ironically I feel it lacks the ‘killer tracks’ of Bixby Canyon Bridge and Grapevine Fires. This is ultimately a bigger crime. An array of technically orchestrated songs feels good as background music but it leaves the listener unfulfilled upon completion of the album. I had every intention of judging this the better of the two productions but after having trouble simply deciding which track to sample here, I realize just how forgettable Codes and Keys really is.

Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. – M83

I mentioned liking the new M83 single before and finally got a chance to preview the new album. Unfortunately, I can’t get into this dreamy, wandering cacophony. A couple of the tracks may be tight but they are hard to find in the dreaded double album format. When you make the needle out of gold, all I’m gonna see is the haystack, and even if I manage to find it, it’s not gonna be worth the time. My amazon sample overview was enough to turn me off to this one.

The Office

I used to enjoy watching this series a lot. I always felt like the American version of The Office copied all the right things from the UK program- the uncomfortable awkwardness when the boss tells a joke, the sideways glances at the camera, the pop culture references. All too often remakes don’t treat the original source material properly but this was a conversion that was done right, thanks in no small part to the lead role played by Steve Carell.

Over time the show did start to wear thin, however. The same jokes were retold a few times too much. The sitcom wasn’t immune to falling back to the usual relationship tropes and gimmicks, even adding new characters for a love interest after the previous ones got married.

And that leads to one of the biggest problems of the show- after years on the air, most of the characters are still nothing more than caricatures without personal affectations. Great, Jim and Pam are a kind of cute, dorky, bland couple. Dwight does stupid things sometimes that can be funny. Outside of that most of the other characters on the show aren’t all that fleshed out.

But worse still, the entire cast is just in place to riff off Michael Scott, the quirky boss. Pam is too nice to talk back to him. Jim constantly shrugs at the camera as if he were in on the joke with the audience. Dwight desperately seeks his approval. Andy awkwardly attempts to gain respectability. The key here is that all of these characterizations work as interactions with the boss.

As soon as Steve Carell leaves the show and the supporting characters need to take center stage and stand on their own, the entire thing falls flat. Nothing Kevin does alone is funny. Oscar never had a purpose other than being the target of politically incorrect jokes and remarks made by Michael Scott. Even Jim and Dwight start to seem forgettable.

It’s an easy call to make. It doesn’t take a fortune teller. This one’s about as obvious as when Valerie left her 80s sitcom Valerie and the producers had to change the name to Valerie’s Family. I regret to say it but The Office has officially jumped the shark.

The Rum Diary

I read this book last summer and didn’t feel like it was notable enough to mention here. It’s not bad by any means; I was entertained reading it but I did feel like it fell short of being noteworthy. Of course everyone is well familiar with Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Johnny Depp is reprising his pseudo-role inspired by the depraved author in a film coming out next year. After reading The Road and regretting not talking about how excellent the book was before the movie was released, I decided not to repeat the experience and comment on The Rum Diary before it went mainstream.

First and foremost I should note that both Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Rum Diary are fictional stories based on experiences in Hunter S. Thompson’s life. The Rum Diary is about a journalist that goes down to Puerto Rico in the 1950s to work for a B rated newspaper with unabashed alcoholism and not giving a fuck as the primary experiences offered. While mostly fictional I would believe that the collection of stories weren’t heavily embellished because the events fail to ever achieve the legendary status that Americans prefer in their tales. Indeed the story remains believable, moving from one exotic experience to the next, slowly building up tension while never truly delivering on what was hinted at.

For the academics looking for a concise narrative or critique of an unwelcome white-run newspaper in the developing state of Puerto Rico, the events fail to hit a satisfying climax and never attempt to teach a lesson gained from hard-gotten wisdom. For the partiers like myself who want a book laden with crazy examples of debauchery- well, aside from a pretty rough party I don’t think the depravity ever hits full steam. In fact, in my urban life it’s likely that I’ve been in comparable situations to anything in the book and I simply felt let down by the normality of it all.

That said, the novel is a fun read and it does romanticize a time and place that we are unaccustomed to today. Being a journalist working a fuck all job for a shitty newspaper in a third world country sounds like a fun romp. If the primary function of your job entails scamming free alcohol and being able to bail you out of jail then it’s safe to say that some interesting things do happen. At the same time I can pretty much guarantee that the movie will be ripe with embellishment to satisfy a modern audience. There’s a reason this novel wasn’t published for decades until 1999, after the box office success of Fear and Loathing. Still, it’s hard to think of Johnny Depp letting us down.