The Factual Opinion

Comics Of The Weak: Don't Call It A Beefcake, He's Been Here For Years

Justice League #5
Art by Jim Lee & Scott Williams
Written by Geoff Johns
Published by DC Comics

Such a miserable experience, reading this comic. It's the narrative equivalent of watching the first episode of that Justice League cartoon in three minute bursts over the course of five months--there's just no way to enjoy that, it's fucking absurd. When you're a kid and you want to hold a boner longer, they tell you to do that exercise where you drape a wet washrag on your shaft and flex it up and down, but they never go so far as to say that you're going to enjoy doing that, or that it's as fun as jerking off, or that you better watch out because you might prefer washrag flexing to putting the thing inside a lady. DC doesn't seem to have ever understood the difference. It's not a surprise that they don't--take a look at the Beat or the Journal's current comment sections, you'll get a plaster cast of what's wrong with comics on both sides--but that doesn't change how tepid and unsatisfying this whole exercise of the Johns/Lee combine has become. Anyway. The Internet says you shouldn't hope people get fired, but honestly, if you just went down the list and got rid of every single person who believes that this comic is worth the four dollars they're asking for it, there's no possible way you wouldn't see an increase in the intelligence average the next time everybody at the staff table pools their "resources" and pours them, like warm oatmeal, into Eddie Berganza's beckoning gullet.

Jennifer Blood #8
Art by Kewber Baal
Written by Al Ewing
Published by Dynamite

Nasty stuff, pretty poorly illustrated for the most part. You can make sense of the art pretty easily, but there's nothing that jumps out as good, the best it ever hopes for is just serviceable. Written relatively well, with some nice Ennis impersonation stuff evenly mixed with what seems to be Ewing's own voice (the "panda" dialog is an excellent line). It's disappointing that one of the most well-regarded of the "new" British writers has to make his entrance into the American market via Dynamite, which is about as good at being a comics publisher as Natalee Holloway is at swimming, but that's just the way of the world in 2012. At least he's got 2000AD--which is currently on a pretty hot streak--to fall back on.

Lone Wolf And Cub: The Message of the Geese & Tale of the Winter Crane
Art by Goseki Kojima
Written by Kazuo Koike
Published by First Comics

"Message of the Geese" is a minor tale, a brief glimpse of the Wolf in battle. It's one of the "features shitting" stories interspersed in the entire saga, a claim to fame that actually isn't all that rare. But beyond the sight of a somewhat constipated Cub forcing out some magic, what sticks in memory most in this brief tale is the momentary compliment paid by the Wolf following his slaughter of a few Yagyu assassins. Upon realizing that one of the Yagyu had sacrificed himself by rushing the Wolf, throwing down his life in hopes that his body might serve as a better launch pad for his partner's attack, the Wolf stops to acknowledge how much like himself the two men were--total dedictation, at less than a moment's notice, to pin all hope, mortal and otherwise, on the missioin, relying on the honor that can only be earned through years of service. It's an excellent moment, one that speaks to one of the saga's greatest strengths: its willingness to embrace the villain.

"Tale of the Winter Crane" is a sneakier story, one whose ending seems always hazily around the corner, only to stop dead with the Wolf (essentially) delivering a "do you know who the fuck I am" speech to a couple of people who don't get it and never will. It's reminscient of that great line at the end of "Mother Russia", when Frank Castle teaches a Delta boy the meaning of the phrase "whatever it takes", made better by the fact that it's delivered with impeccable class by a man who just killed five people with a sword. It's a brief stopover, but a pleasant one.

SFSF2C
By Ryan Cecil Smith

Somewhat reminscient of that Black Jack story where he's brought in to treat a crazy computer, this final installment in Smith's cover version of Matsumoto Leiji's Queen Emeraldas concludes the story the same way it began, with our protagonist musing on a life lived in motion. There's something fascinating about the way the comic depicts space travel as being so empty and "boundless" that it seems as much a philosophical exercise in not going crazy as it is an exercise in just going, anywhere. At the end, this little excursion seems like something that belongs most to its creator (not Matsumoto, but Smith) than it does the audience, and while that isn't a criticism--if anything, this sort of openness to allow an audience inside an obsession should be met with praise--it does underline how exciting it will be to get back to SF proper, a story where the viewing hole is more distinctly made clear.

The Flash #5
By Francis Manapul & Brian Buccellato
Published by DC Comics

In the same way that it's hard not to overpraise Snyder and Capullo's Batman for being the fastest cripple in the polio race, it's hard to ignore that all these current installments of the Flash certainly are a pleasure to look at. There's a delightful strain of homoeroticism running through the current storyline, which is all about contemporary male relationships and great haircuts (without Geoff Johns around to champion conservatism, Manapul has been free to jettison Barry Allen's godawful Right Stuff flattop for a brighter, more pomaded, future). It never feels amatuerish, but one's still left with the nagging feeling that, just maybe, it would if it didn't look so consistently great. For now though, let's just be optimistic and raise a glass to future team-ups with cardigans and soulful brown eyes. That's my kind of rogue's gallery: the kind where the rogues are just some dudes who fuck some other dudes with easily replicatable fashion choices.

-Tucker Stone, 2012

Too Many Movies: That Cronenberg, Always A Crowd Pleaser

A Dangerous Method, dir. David Cronenberg
Matt Seneca

It’s been fashionable recently to say David Cronenberg’s a misogynist, at least in the film-criticism organs I regularly interact with (that’d be LA Weekly, LA Weekly, and the noted LA Weekly), especially in the run-up to his new movie A Dangerous Method. And yeah: the film does prominently feature a jealous wife who saps her brilliant husband’s vitality, women who have no ideas of their own until they develop out of studying male-proposed theories, and a plot that revolves around a hysterically insane beauty’s slow return to relative sanity once she realizes that all she wants is to get her ass spanked, belted, or otherwise tore the fuck up by a suitably awesome dude. And yet somehow the movie feels like a rebuke to the easy characterization of Cronenberg as woman-hater: for two hours we watch Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung and Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud blustering around in stuffed shirts on Joseph Campbell-style heroic quests for knowledge the women they regularly mistreat have had all along. What makes the film more complex than any mid-20th century piece of whimsy about that ole feminine intuition is that understanding things about who we are as people doesn’t look nearly as good on camera as topping a corseted and bound Kiera Knightley does.

Even in this relatively sedate, cerebral period piece Cronenberg’s way with the indelible image remains. Without special effects or even particularly crazy camera work, the onus is on the actors to communicate the director’s signature sense of a world stretched through some alien filter or other, and the result is the strongest performances ever to grace a Cronenberg film. Fassbender is wonderfully frustrating to watch, forever on the verge of an epiphany he never reaches -- in the S&M scenes that everyone in the audience knows should provide him with transcendence especially, the man visibly recedes, leaving only a creepily mustachioed robot swinging his arm wildly back and forth. Mortensen is sufficiently enigmatic, never giving any hint as to his inner workings: the perfect father figure, simultaneously benevolent and unknowable. And a bearded Vincent Cassel as coked out renegade psychiatrist Otto Gross is pretty high up there as personifications of amoral hedonism go. (The film misses the golden opportunity of showing us Cassel and Mortensen banging rails on an all night bender together, but that’s one of only a few strikes against it.)

The film, however, belongs to Knightley, who announces her arrival in the top ranks of working actresses with a performance that would be the only logical choice for the Oscar if not for its incandescent daring, which far outstrips that of the timid Academy voting bloc. As the mental patient-turned-psychiatrist Sabina Spielrein, she singlehandedly brings body horror to what’s essentially a period romance. A spitting, teeth-baring, writhing, masturbating vortex of mental illness in the film’s first third, she commands every bit of the viewer’s attention for every second she’s on screen, even when covered by blankets or subsumed in water. This is full-body acting for the ages, the former Disney pirate-princess’s willowy frame turned to an assemblage of bones that wrack and distort and melt back into captivating, piteous docility within a single breath. But Knightley really shows her chops once she’s cured: the whirlwind inside her does not disappear but is constantly kept at bay, an affliction tortuously written over by visible force of will, only allowed to resurface in the scenes of sadomasochism, whose questionable equation of female sexuality with mental illness is only visible in retrospect. In the moment, all we see is a woman caught somewhere between sanity and insanity, one who seems close to shedding her own skin or suffusing into radiant light. The best fight scenes of the year aren’t in any of the summer blockbusters or even the Korean imports: they’re here, inside Knightley’s body, unspoken but no less luminous for that.

So overwhelming is this show of talent that when the film strays away from Knightley toward the end it takes a minute or two to catch up: oh sure, we remember, Cronenberg might be trying to say something that isn’t contained in one individual’s performance. As such, the film’s real message hits exactly at the right moment. Leave it to a Canadian filmmaker making a movie set over a century ago to create the defining statement about a Europe that’s currently tearing itself to shreds: Spielrein’s theory that true purity can only come from a clash between dark and light that subsumes the individual identities of both is positioned as prophecy, building the violent, remedial sex between the Aryan Jung and the Jewish Spielrein into a metaphor for World War II, the looming memory of which softened borders and brought about a Europe that has managed to unite in name, at least. (Of course, a line of reasoning that views the Holocaust as a continent’s necessary therapeutic evil has its own problems, but look what the anti-Semite tag did for Lars Von Trier!) The film ends with a premonition of apocalypse -- Jung on the eve of the first world war, torn apart by dreams of approaching cataclysm, and a credits-sequence cue card informing viewers that Sabina Spielrein met her eventual end at the hands of an SS death squad.

It’s about as dire as sun-dappled endings shot along the banks of the Rhine get, but not for nothing: today’s united Europe inches a little closer to death with every passing morning, and it’s pretty terrifying to imagine what we’re in for once that particular cataclysm goes down. Good metaphorical films are a dime a dozen, and so are good movies about the past, but sometimes it takes a misogynist Nazi to put together something so cutting you fear for your own future.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
The One That's In English, 2011

A way better movie than the story deserves, and a way better product display than H&M could have possibly paid for. There's no use arguing about this fucking thing anymore, so let's just list what we know: it's a shitty mystery, Lisbeth Salander has less human traits than a box full of ketchup, and Steig Larrsson's wish fulfilment sex and professional fantasies wear out their welcome after the first pass. Fincher does some great stuff in this with the way he cuts a scene together (my personal favorite is the part where Daniel Craig tells Christopher Plummer he has to leave at a certain time, only for Fincher to later cut from the two men sharing a laugh to the face of a clock/which is at a station/next to a sign/for the train that Craig just failed to catch), but this isn't a story that needed telling past the potboiler stage, and it certainly didn't need to waste the time of so many talented people in doing so.

Red Letter Media/Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Whoa, 2012

There's a section in this early on--if you haven't seen it, I'd hate to ruin it for you--where the guy who makes these things essentially throws down the gauntlet harder than I thought was still possible. It's the part involving the Olsen twins and screaming. The second that a better statement on creating "content" for the internet is made, let me know. Right now, this is the champion.

Star Wars Uncut
I made it about seven minutes in, 2012

In keeping with the prizewinning theme, the bar is now officially set: here is the best pro-SOPA argument ever made. Were you listening, webcomics?

The Mechanic
Statham's No Bronson, But Jan Ain't Got Shit On Foster, 2011

There's some bad action here, most of which is attributable to whoever it was that didn't have faith in the ability of the Statham/Foster duo to deliver intrigue without the help of all the overthought action pieces (behind a wall? off a high rise?), but don't let the comparison game get in the way of the general problem: this is a shitty movie that doesn't trust Jason Statham, and while you can get away with that when Jason Statham isn't in your movie, you can't when he very much is. Case in point? The best sequence in a Statham action flick shouldn't be a scene where Ben Foster executes three guys in less time than it takes to remember your mother's name. It should be a scene where Statham does something, preferably with his abs and his fists. Otherwise, you just fucked up the movie version of a peanut butter sandwich.

Kill List
That Happened, 2011

Here's a brief (stolen) list of some of the movies that relate in part to Kill List: Rosemary's Baby, Dead Man's Shoes, Wicker Man, Angel Heart, Straw Dogs, Come and See, Full Metal Jacket. Genre hopping, upsetting, increasingly violent the sort of degree that more than a few will most certainly abandon watching it after a specific sequence set at a kitchen table (and will be right to do so, considering what follows), this is an excellent piece of endurance testing. It is fearsomely compelling and yet almost unwatchable. Recommended?

Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol
Scientology Totally Works, 2011

Following a solid piece of action-eering sullied only by its prominent usage in this film's many trailers, Ghost Protocol--which is a much more ridiculous, and therefore far better title than MI:4 would have been--turns its lens on the introduction of its main character. In keeping with Cruisian law number 714, which states that Tom prefers for his acting to circulate prominently around a character's proclivity for athletic equipment (see Few Good Men, see Top Gun), we're treated to the sight of Mr. Ethan Hunt playing with a rubber ball. It's a great reminder of what these movies are all about: a dude who has balls and does shit. Introspection is fun for some, but for this guy, the game's the thing, and if you don't have one to task him with, he'll find one all on his own.

It's a big fake out though. The real introduction comes next. As our phenomenally physically qualified Hunt stalks, rolls and elbows his way out of a prison riot, with Frank Sinatra cheering him own, a funny thing happens: you see it. It's a weird moment, the one where your brain clicks on a little sharper, realizing that this is going to be one of those action movies where you can't figure out how they did it, because aw shit did ya see that?! 

The entire rest of it is like that, and it only lets up so that Simon Pegg can roam around and make his co-stars (only one of whom ever really "acts", which is why he seems so out of place) laugh at all the Simon Pegg-type reactions he has to things. Everybody will have their own favorite set pieces; mine is definitely the one where Cruise hits the roof of a passing vehicle and falls onto the ground. It's not as flashy as any of the rest of them, and it certainly won't show up in anybody's highlight reel, but there was just something about it that called back to those post Supercop Jackie Chan movies: the honesty of a badass getting older, and yet still willing to get smacked around to make the shot work.

Super 8
Until They'll Put E.T. On Netflix Streaming, 2011

The thing that made that JJ Abrams Star Trek movie worthwhile was that it took something completely unwatchable (Star Trek) and made it tolerable for the first time. In Super 8, all he seems to have done is take something that was totally fine (The Goonies, E.T., your working memory) and brush it up with more nostalgiac dickpulling. The scene where Elle Fanning "acts" is pretty fantastic, but beyond that, this is just a waste of Eric Taylor's time. Ugh.

Patrice O'Neal Elephant In The Room, 2011
One Night Stand featuring Patrice O'Neal, 2005
Richard Pryor Live at the Sunset Strip, 1982

For whatever reason, it's the One Night Stand that made me laugh the hardest of these three, despite Pryor's classicness and the jaw-dropping terrorism of Elephant In The Room. Maybe it's because One Night Stand is the more violent performance, a torrent of energy from a man hungry to prove himself? All of these are great, though. Not a weak show in the bunch.

The Last Picture Show
Quaid Was Always Crazy, 1971

Lovely film, blessed with what has to be one of the all time scene stealing performances from Cloris Leachman. Every moment she's on screen it feels like everything around her is holding its breath, even the inaminate objects. The way she looks at Timothy Bottoms can rip your guts out in a way that Cybill Shepherd's absurd beauty can only hope to mimic.

Head
Hell Yes, 1968

A total financial failure that is absolutely entertaining and far more engaging than its detractors would have one believe. Very short, very funny.

-Tucker Stone, Matt Seneca, 2012

My Wife: Tracked Down An Old Flame

Whispers #1
By Joshua Luna
Published by Image Comics

Oh man! Opening up to that first page and seeing that Luna art felt like coming home. Home! I had wonderful flashbacks to my time with The Sword. Gosh, did I enjoy that comic. I’d almost forgotten how much until I opened Whispers.

So here we are! Issue one in what I hope will be a long series. So far, it's mostly set up: introducing the who, the what, the where, the when and the why for the series. There are definitely some similarities to The Sword in story tactics (is that the right way to say it? You’ll see what I mean.)

You see, back in The Sword, our main character was a wheelchair bound girl who found a sword that gave her magical powers such as giving her the ability to self-heal, or massive amounts of strength. In Whispers, we have a young man who seems to be "crippled" by his OCD, and we see him developing a magical power that's sort of like astral projection: the ability to hear loved one’s thoughts as well as possibly influence their behavior.

And, yes, it looks to be a hero’s journey of sorts. In the Sword, Dara used her powers to go and avenge her family’s death which she witnessed just before finding The Sword - the very thing the killers were after. This powerful weapon had a story that spanned history, a whole mythology that served as the original source of conflict for the whole story.

So far, in Whispers, the set-up is not as dramatic. So far! I’m saying that because, well, I read the first third of The Sword in the trade format. My recollection of it as one overall story comes from that fact, that I read most of it in very quick succession. Reading Whispers, I realized that it might have taken a couple of issues to really set-up the story, something I wouldn't have noticed. Reading it like this, in a smaller chunk, I wonder if I might be giving the information (the piece of story I just read) more emphasis than it really needs. If, for example, I was reading a collection of multiple issues of Whispers, would I be stopping to wonder why Sam (the main character) and Lily recently broke up? Or would I just acknowledge that bit of information (okay, they broke up) and keep moving forward? Would I get as irritated with Rico (a character that picks on Sam for his behavior), or would I just keep reading, having faith that Rico's behavior is necessary to the story and not something I should get that worked up about?

I don't know. It's worth thinking about, but it would be a tough thing to test.

And that brings us to....Astral Projection. Yeah. That’s kinda what this is about. That makes me a little bit worried. I’m sorry, but it does. See, with The Sword, even though it wasn’t “realistic” or “plausible” it was easy to understand. The Sword made her strong. Without it she was weak and vulnerable. Being able to visit people while you are sleeping/dreaming in a way that they can’t see you - I don’t fully yet understand how to grasp hold of it. Sam will be armed with information and therefore truth? He can influence events, perhaps? I’m not entirely sure. It's not like vampires. I wasn't sitting here reading Whispers and remembering all those awesome astral projection movies I watched when I was a kid. I don't have a bunch of daydreams about invisibly floating around in people's bedrooms. (I have a few, of course.)

But I remember how much I loved the Sword, and looking at these very first pages of Whispers...I want this to be that good. I would love to fall in love with something like that again.

Fingers crossed.

-Nina Stone, 2012

Comics Of The Weak: You Can't Work Off A Fat Personality, Buster Brown

Prophet #21
Art by Simon Roy and Richard Hope His Name Really Is Ballerman
Written by Brandon Graham
Published by Image Comics

A nice mix-up of Rip Van Winkle, Prison Pit and Conan (easier version: a French sci-fi comic), with guest appearances by the horrorshow that the dog becomes in The Thing, Prophet #21 does exactly what it had to do to meet up with the pre-show hype: it works. Delivering tone and building its world, skipping the corny character signifiers and logos that stand in for personalities and motives in the rest of the Image universe was the best move Graham could have made, forcing the reader to move closer to Simon Roy, an artist finished with his Otomo/Gipi phase and setting up shop in the "how would Jesse Marsh draw manga" school of obsesion. It's fun, and it's weird. If that's not your thing, there's plenty of the alternative available.

Wonder Woman #5
Art by Tony Akins & Matthew Wilson
Written by Brian Azzarello
Published by DC Comics

Now that Wonder Woman has successfully made it over the "hope it doesn't get cancelled" hump, isn't it time we address the fact that Hermes is wearing the ugliest sunglasses ever made, sunglasses that are second only to a backwards baseball cap in making a man look like a total toolbag? Even if we ignore his Woodstock '99 era rain poncho--and we really shouldn't ignore that thing, because that's as much a sign of the unfunny side of perversion as it would be if he was driving a white panel van with no windows--we're still five issues into a relationship where the most happening broad in the land has yet to tell her own brother that, oh, you know, he's wearing the same fucking sunglasses that Jerry Sandusky wore everytime he wanted to hide his tired eyes from the harsh light of a world where the rest of us don't fuck children in showers.

Daredevil #8
Written by Mark Waid
Art by Kano & Javier Rodriguez
Published by Marvel Comics

If any title is going to survive Marvel's bizarre creative tailspin, the smart money has to be on Daredevil, a book that's almost quaint with its slow-burn long tale plotting, most of which circles around the possession of a high end flash drive, packed to the gills with evil secrets. Even a tie-in with the Amazing Spider-Man (a series that is taking a short break from one piece of shit story arc so that it can rest its weary, shit-filled bones before it delivers what looks to be another piece of shit story arc) didn't slow it down that much, which comes as a surprise when you consider how little anyone, fictional or otherwise, wants to be around Peter Parker for a length of time more extensive than it would take to stab him in his stupid, stupid whining eyes.

Usagi Yojimbo Volume 6
By Stan Sakai
Published by Fantagraphcis

About half this volume of Usagi is taken up with stories where the samurai rabbit deals with the supernatural, while the other half--a multi part story called "Circles"--concerns itself with the warrior's past, albeit with a supernatural villian thrown in. There's also a quick, predictable one-shot involving a couple of conmen, but don't let the implication of shittiness that the word "predictable" brings with it take hold: there's enough great comic-stuff going on in the story to make up for the fact that you can chart every strand of plot the thing has after reading the first five--maybe four--pages. Sakai's ability to draw a character's motives into their facial features is one of his weirdest and most fascinating talents. It's easy to spot the bad guys in most funny animal comics, and that's why Usagi Yojimbo is a cut above the rest--the complexity on display here in the face of the depressed, one-more-scam swordsmen goes beyond the simple "he's a fox, and foxes are tricky".

"The Duel" is excellent preparation for "Circles", which is all about motives and revelations. Usagi decides to return to his former home, only to walk into another one of those hard-working townspeople versus rapacious bandits settings so popular in samurai fiction. He discovers an old friend and old enemy, both still alive, checks in on his estranged lover (who packs a revelation of her own), the friend-turned-rival that married her, and then there's a nice, long battle that lasts multiple pages without ever seeming the slightest bit self-indulgent. It's a lovely story, and what it lacks in humor (Usagi just isn't funny without Gen or that detective character around) it makes up for in earnest sincerity.

Lone Wolf and Cub: The Inn of the Last Chrysanthemum
Art by Goseki Kojima
Written by Kazuo Koike
Published by First Comics

If someone were to make a graph of the types of Lone Wolf & Cub stories, they'd first break them down into two major categories--the one-off ones where he earns money by killing people, and the ones where the ongoing narrative is pushed towards conclusion. Eventually, the entire book focuses entirely on that second category, all of which build to the most satisfying conclusion to any genre comic book ever published. That's not intended to be hyperbole: it's a statement of fact, albeit one that's only seen meager research. The greats of American genre comics--Eisner and Kirby--never got a chance (some quarters might word that "never took a chance", but not this one, and fuck those people) to play around with conclusions and finality anymore than Shultz, King and Herriman (a few of the greats of the newspaper strip) did. Leaving the question of whether genre requires an ending aside for a moment (a moment that could last an eternity, for how little I care to probe it), "The Inn of the Last Chrysanthemum" rests firmly in that first category described above: this one's all about the money.

One of Koike's most consistent methods of story construction is to focus the reader's attention entirely on the point of view of some new, as of yet unknown to us character. We follow that character through their (often depressing) life, they experience a few flashbacks that explain their current situation, at some point the Wolf and Cub arrive in their orbit, and then the story leads up to an (often violent) conclusion. In many cases, the story takes on an intense sense of danger and heightening panic after the appearance of the Wolf, because while this structure of story often appears in the overall saga, there's never any promise that the story will conclude happily for all we might hope it will. Sometimes the best the Wolf can do is mete out revenge for abuses suffered, other times he can only acknowledge them in word, and on a few occasions (not few enough to where the sting is ever lessened), he can only provide a quick, honorable passing for those whose long-term victimization leaves them unable to find any way forward in the mortal realm. "Chrysanthemum" is on the bleak end of the scale--the only bottom left for its guest protagonist, the "forlorn maiden, forced into a life of shame" is found in a blood drenched garden, and the only satisfaction found is in the bodies that the Wolf piles alongside her own. There's no pretense that it will be enough, but in keeping with Koike's plan, it's made clear: what matters is that debts get paid. What happens next is never our concern.

King-Cat #72
By John Porcellino
Published by John Porcellino

Even if you don't read the opening letter, where Porcellino admits that most of what you're about to read stems from a time period when, busted up by heartbreak and economic collapse, he "didn't do so good", you'd have to be one cold ass son of a bitch--or a non-Porcellino fan out scraping scabs--not to pick up on the general dourness of the whole enterprise. The crippling impact of a Faith Hill song? An out of nowhere "I don't want to be alive anymore" response to a Porcellino-standard observation of natural beauty and the change of seasons? It's not that these sorts of emote-heavy moments are a strange appearance in the guy's work--this is King-Creamballs-Cat we're talking about, feelings are what these little bastards always traffic in, occasionally to an embarrassing degree usually reserved for Thomas Kinkade--it's that they're being delivered in such a raw, unkempt fashion. There's no lesson at the end of this issue, no explanation given, just the implication that survival is the game, the only thing that Porcellino was going for. Each of these documents--even the moment of nostalgia that sees the guy flashing back to the irritating dopiness of youth--concludes on the same note: he made it when everything was coming at him knives out. Not every struggle has a t-shirt phrase to go along with it.

Batman #5
Art by Greg Capullo
Written by Scott Snyder
Published by DC Comics

There's some serious self-indulgence going on here--landscape two page spreads for no purpose beyond the ability to say "hey, look, big", coupled with the demanding notion that you're reading about a secret society of owl-obsessed maze-building super-killers, and yeah, sorry, "owls" IS tougher to swallow than "bats", anybody who tells you different doesn't like super-hero shit in the first place--but that aside, this is actually a good little Batman comic. It doesn't deserve the over-the-top praise that it's gotten, but at the same time, it's totally understandable why that praise has been so hyperbolic: this has been the shittiest group of Batman titles in a long time. Having a decent issue show up, an issue that sees a plot humming forward with solid illustration to boot--that's going to get some knees buckling, especially amongst those who have been plugging their quarters into the super-hero slot machine since this New 52 thing started. But don't get too worked up: you've never met anyone who is going to read this thing twice, and you never will.

Thunderbolts #169
Art by Kev Walker, Tery Pallot & Frank Martin Jr.
Written by Jeff Parker
Published by Marvel Comics

Time traveling away from Marvel's bone dry continuity and hanging out amongst King Arthur, violence, Merlin, and lots and lots of titties--if you're using the word breasts to describe what Kev Walker's drawing, you really don't fucking get it and probably never will--Thunderbolts #169 (god bless them for keeping the inane numbering of this series) is one of those totally enjoyable comics that probably shouldn't get mentioned on a blog, because that's a sure fire way to see the thing get cancelled the next time Marvel wants to do one of their periodical "how can we fuck up the thing that people like and want to buy" (see the Amazing Spider-Man and Uncanny X-Force for examples, look under the paragraph heading "Really Shitty Art"). But hey, why not tempt fate?

-Tucker Stone, 2012

Comics Of The Weak: Playing Totally For Type

Lone Wolf and Cub: Dragon Tiger Cloud Wind
Art by Goseki Kojima
Written by Kazuo Koike
Published by First Comics

In this chapter of the greatest comic ever, the Wolf comes upon one of the men he left behind, a former samurai still living in the exact place where he last saw the Wolf: the day the Wolf seconded the samurai's former lord's seppuku. There's no hatred or ill feelings to be found on either side, and while the conclusion is totally foregone, it's delivered with a sense of respect for the ideals the story promotes. It isn't the first time that Koike plays a scene with that kind of emotion, but that doesn't make it any less lovely. The action is, of coruse, a demented pleasure to witness, with the most graphic violence handed off to the Wolf's shadow. The opening ten pages--silent but for a few cries of death--is a masterful depiction of slaughter that introduces the man far better than any dialog ever could.

Plastic Man Archives Volume 4
By Jack Cole
Published by DC Comics

While this volume has some of the best covers you'll see (if you're reading these things in order, which is totally pointless but probably the only way people are reading them, because they have numbers on them, see: assholes like me), there's a limit to how long you can stare at Woozy WInks believing an Eskimo woman is pawing at him when, in reality, he's being sexually harassed by a lusty polar bear, and that limit is probably the same amount of time it's taking you to parse this description. If you hold out until the last story--that's 180 pages of holding out, by the way--you'll be rewarded by the sight of Plastic Man turning into a gigantic whale for the purposes of seduction. Your mileage may vary, or whatever that asshole phrase is, but it's a sight that is totally worth your time. He turns into a horny red whale!

Amazing Spider-Man #677
Written by Mark Waid
Art by Emma Rios and Javier Rodriguez
Published by Marvel Comics

There's no better statement on the question of whether super-hero comics is in a weird, stupid place regarding their business state of affairs then the fourth page of this comic, which is an advertisement for a goddamned wax museum in Hollywood. Deal with that one for a second: an advertisement for something that's only interesting to the most antisocial deviant tourists on God's green Earth, a location that has no appeal other than the fact that, if it burned down to the ground, absolutely every warring group on the planet could come together and hold hands under the banner of not giving the remotest fuck. That's the absolute best thing that somebody at Marvel Comics--which is owned by a gigantic multinational entertainment conglomerate--could come up with to plaster into this comic. Spin some huckster positivity out of that, Sergeant Pepper. (The comic is excellent, if that still matters.)

Fatale #1
Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Sean Phillips and Dave Stewart
Published by Icon Image, hey maybe things are getting fun again

Containing some of Philips finest panels yet--first up that car flip, second the street scene--and adding another accomplished notch in the belt of the best colorist working, Fatale is a reward on a purely visual front. But the area where it might be even more interesting is on the writing front. Horror--if that's what you call the dreck currently ladled out by the shit merchants at IDW--is the prize pet of the low rent High Concept Kids, a loosely descriptive term I just came up with to define people who come up with 4 to 6 issue mini-series that are usually based around plot construction methods learned from Lego, i.e. taking Jack Bauer or Dexter clones and shuffling them together with bang up ideas like "zombies with ties" or "vampires with clits", plus a heaping dash of BBC references, cuz it's classy. Brubaker's the first real writer in a while to fuck with this stuff, unless you count Alan Moore's really weird rape sequel to Fish Police.

-Tucker Stone, 2012

The Wife: Likes Life More Because of These Johnny Wander Comics

I’m having a really cool week. And it looks like it's going to keep getting better.

Historical background: in my upper-middle-class, predominantly white-collar, Land's End infected, mega- conservative High School, I was considered artsy and “different”. And while that’s cool and all, I wouldn’t necessarily say that was a label I earned by doing anything particularly dramatic. I just happended to be living in a town/situation/cultural environment with an ingrown animosity towards creativity. I mean, it had to engage with these things in some fashion, if only to meet college preparatory requirements. And yet, even in the one tiny area where creativity was the actual purpose, it still operated with the strictest of observations. Channeled into the fewest possible outlets the community would allow, it ended up being: dancing school, band, choir, and a tiny bit of theatre. That was it. I don’t know what fine art students had on offer, if they could even find the support and guidance other communities provide with which to nurture their art. And when I decided that I wanted to be a dancer, that, by neccessity, took me away from school in a way that prevented me from participating in any extra-curricular school-related activities. The simple fact that I went somewhere other than the primary place that almost everyone went was all it took for me to earn the label as an "artsy" person.

I had an outlet for creative expression, sure. But, as I've come to realize, it was usually someone else’s creativity that I was expressing. That's what we were all taught to do there--to be the release for someone else's dormant fantasies of what a life of art might have been like for them. I don't regret it, and I can't say that I was cognizant enough at the time to have been disappointed it--I loved dancing--but enough time has passed for me to have no problem admitting that it might not have been the ideal situation for any of the parties involved.

Which leads us to this week: I’m having this late-bloomer, um, blossoming right now. I’ve dance and sung all my life, but my inner musician has always been there, aching to get out and replace the words of others with notes of my own. And now she’s out! Here I am, in Brooklyn, and just last night I enjoyed the first meeting of the new songwriter circle I’m now a part of (I even shared my latest creation!). Today I had a guitar and theory lesson, and with my new knowledge of some music theory (as well as some improvising), I came up with a bass line for my new song. Following that, I had an actual gig--I got paid to go rock my pink guitar and sing songs to children and their families. And I'm having so much fun doing all those things!

And the icing on the cake? Tonight I am reviewing Johnny Wander - Volume 2: Escape to New York, the night before I get to attend the release party for this comic and actually MEET Yuko Ota, Ananth Panagariya, and hopefully the rest of the gang. I am SO excited!!! Who’s having the time of her life??? That would be me. Totally me.

SO here we all are - the Johnny Wander folks and myself -- doing our thing ('s?) in Brooklyn. Doing my "thing” has also led me to reviewing comics with my husband's encouragement and support, and being so fortunate as to actually seeing a blurb of my review of Johnny Wander Volume 1 end up on the back cover of Johnny Wander Volume 2. (That’s all because I have the most awesome husband in the world.)

It's a great week, right?! In case it's not obvious, I am so thrilled to write about all of this right now. I loved this volume of Johnny Wander as much as the last. It is a 100% pleasure to read. Before sitting down at the computer to write this, I sat on the couch saying to my husband, “Oh and this one! Come look at this one! Isn’t that hilarious? Oh wait - you also have to look at this thing about Garies.”

Once again, as reader, I got to be a fly on the wall in the world of Yuko, Ananth, Conrad, John, Mike, Rook, and sometimes Evan and one time George’s. All that life is in this book. Is it weird to say that reading about their life made me want to stop and really observe my own a little bit more? It's not that I don’t. But from reading this comic, I feel like these are friends who really know how to enjoy their time together. It makes me want to be sure I'm doing the same. I realize that they are just showing us snapshots of part of their day(s) that, perhaps, are not all that special to them in the moment they are happening. However, writing and illustrating a series of vignettes about one’s life seems like a great way to capture time in a poignant way.It's way more poignant than taking digital photos or creating “clever” Facebook status updates does. (I'm not making fun! I'm talking about me.)

I’m sitting here, right now, flipping through the book in an effort to come up with my “favorites” to tell you about. And yet, with every page I’m like, “oh yeah....I LOVE that one! OH - and that one too....”

So let me gather myself up, again, and tell you about this book in case you’ve never read or seen it before.

Ananth, Yuko, Conrad, John and Mike, all live together (or did at one time) in an apartment in Brooklyn. And although along the way, some people move out and some move in, they all stay friends and hang out quite bit. This book is a series of one and two page vignettes, as I call them, illustrating their experience living in New York. Brooklyn, specifically.

We are treated to illustrations of things like their coffee mug collection, or the preparation or eating of a meal - as well as its aftermath - art about doing art, backstories such as Yuko’s “traumatizing dental misadventures”, excursions, and interludes about the newest addition to their home - the cat, Rook.

(I have to say that this might be my new favorite part. Anything about Rook. I’m a sucker for cats. Every single section that was about Rook and his quirkiness, or about cats in general, always had be laughing with recognition. I love that they’ve captured some uninterrupted cat behavior and brought it to life. Rook is drawn so well. The subtle changes of the height of his ears, the way he cocks his head when he’s inspecting something, the tiny little adjustments that cats make? It's all really well drawn. I adore him. (So if ya’ll ever need a cat sitter - I’m your girl.)

As a matter of fact, I continually find myself stopping to enjoy the facial expressions as they are drawn. Each individual comic seems to be set up with an opening frame that delivers the who, what, where and when. Then there is the conflict or the joke, and somewhere in the final frames is a close-up on the facial expression of one of the characters. And its often so subtle - just a stare, or eyebrows drawn slightly closer together - but every time it lands like a punchline. I LOVE it! (I find it hilarious how John so often is drawn with a bothered expression.)

The experience of reading Johnny Wander Volume 2 makes me understand why people like reading graphic novels and comics. And that’s a big thing for me to say. I’m not one who grew up reading comics, and I feel like if you didn’t grow up reading them, it's not something you get into later in life. But I’m finding that I thoroughly dig autobio comics, especially in this form. This material is so relatable, and like I said, it inspires me to observe and enjoy my own life more.

Perhaps that’s why this week is so cool. It's not necessarily cooler than any other week that I’ve been having. But as I’ve been reading Johnny Wander, I’ve stopped to observe the vignettes I get to have in my own life, I get to reflect, and I'm finding myself enjoying it even more.

It is an exceptionally cool week, however!!!! And I cannot wait for tomorrow night to hang out with these folks. It's gonna be like walking into a book and hanging out with my favorite characters. Who gets to do that?!?!? Me, that’s who. :)

-Nina Stone, 2012

The Top 30 Albums of 2011: 10-1

10. Frank Ocean - Nostalgia/Ultra

In a year where R&B had an out-of-nowhere renaissance, between mainstream radio and weirdo online only releases (seriously, it may not be the best album but The Dream’s “Wedding Crasher” is probably my most-played track of the year), Frank Ocean managed to not have any competition in great songwriting (or in a few cases rewriting other people’s eh songs as great songs, fudging the “your favorite hip hop/r&b artist’s taste in rock is about the same as your mom’s” rule by making a Coldplay track pretty listenable). Subject matter, this is as much about sex and relationships as the Jodeci he takes a swipe at in one of the interstitials, but there is a breadth of language and approach to subject matter on this record that makes Nostalgia/Ultra different. “Novacane” draws a parallel between a need to be numb and the current studio-frankensteined style of his genre, but still manages to walk us through a pretty specific story in a way you only see in golden age rap and singer-songwriter deep cuts. “We All Try” positions Ocean’s relationship with his girl by laying out his entire belief system. “Songs For Women” playfully navigates the before and after of becoming a songwriter to get with girls, and what it feels like when the one girl isn’t interested. A pretty rote love song is bookended with a monologue from Eyes Wide Shut, seemingly tearing into the misogyny of the track itself. On “There Will Be Tears”, Ocean gives us the heartbreaking ballad, but instead of being lovesick for a girl he sings about growing up without a father and losing his grandfather. He sings his heart out, and it hurts, and not in the way that these kind of songs ever hurt to listen to. All of Nostalgia/Ultra takes what are essentially genre tropes that have been worn smooth and impersonal and make them personal to Ocean in ways that show how idiosyncratic an approach he can take without really changing up what an album like this should deliver. Everything here is a presentation of Ocean’s personality - from the videogame cartridge noise to the way he approaches sex, and how well it speaks to you has everything to do with how you respond to him.  -SW

9. Big K.R.I.T. - Return of 4Eva

The truth is, coke rap was always a metaphor for the music industry. Just like most rock bands’ second albums are secretly about the process of making a second album, raps about hustling on the corner are really raps about hustling to get into the studio. Hustler’s remorse is just self-doubt. Measuring weight = measuring sales. The good shit is the good shit. Keys open doors… to your new career! But these days every rapper is his own label, accountant, and marketing department. Rappers like Nicki Minaj and Kanye West use the music industry itself as a lyrical focus. So what’s the metaphor now?

On Return of 4Eva, 25-year-old Mississippi native Big K.R.I.T.’s industry talk seeps out between the UGK-indebted tributes to wood grain that define his album. He claims that rap labels aren’t interested in signing someone who’s just rapping about country shit. They’re not interested in someone aiming for a collection of songs rather than a monster single. That may be legit; it may be part of K.R.I.T.’s mythos. Either way, it’s K.R.I.T.’s relationship with his own career that gives Return of 4Eva its poignancy. When he’s not fetishizing his tires, K.R.I.T. is transparently working through the artist’s process—ambition, second thoughts, trying to be the person your family and friends see you as. Every time he contemplates writing a gangsta track or wonders if his deceased grandmother has been pulling strings for him from beyond the veil, K.R.I.T. taps into that larger metaphor—how you fight or buckle against the seemingly unmovable forces in your life, especially when it seems like you’re not built to succeed. That’s the difference between coke rap and industry rap: there’s no underdog in the crack game.

“Couldn’t pay the rent, but passed up on the deal because it wasn’t right,” K.R.I.T. raps on “Dreamin’,” “Sometimes you gotta wade the storm.” You’re not going to get better life coaching from the Clipse. -MB

8. WU LYF - Go Tell Fire to the Mountain

The cover I usually see attached to WU LYF’s Go Tell Fire to the Mountain is a simple collage. A shard of a picture of raging fire tearing through tall, dry grass sits on top of a picture of storm clouds burrowing through mountaintops, just below a crystalline sky. WU LYF’s music is similarly elemental, a torrent of swells and decrescendos, with singer Ellery Roberts’ anguished voice calling out through the flames.

Go Tell Fire to the Mountain’s vinyl album cover is even more intriguing. It primitively depicts a group of people embracing and celebrating at the edge of a body of water, itself in front of a pyramid-shaped hill. WU LYF’s full name is displayed—World Unite: Lucifer Youth Foundation—and at the top, against a white background, sits a modified cross with a W at the top. Because the cover’s not as immediately visually striking, the vinyl album could conceivably be lost and rediscovered in a record bin decades from now, mistaken for a relic from a tribe or cult. And that’s exactly what it sounds like, from the passionate sweep of the orchestration to the organ-led songs to the chanted choruses. When lyrics do creep out through Roberts’ garbled annunciation, they are often familial (as on the self-explanatory “We Bros”), adoring (he is as unafraid to say “I love you” as anyone since Billy Corgan), or primal (the most articulated lyric is the refrain “I’m spitting blood”). It’s as if Go Tell Fire to the Mountain has been unearthed from a colony, tucked away somewhere in the Western hemosphere, where the inhabitants worship at the church of Broken Social Scene, and even the discontents are occupying bro street. -MB

7. Wooden Shjips - West

While I have few music examples beyond Watch The Throne at hand, it certainly seems like 2011 was a year where our more reliable sluggers failed to get on base. David Fincher continued his post-Zodiac “i’m taking some time off from hard work”, Soderbergh remade Full Frontal with disease in place of the jokes, Thom Yorke accidentally labeled his new solo album as a Radiohead one, and then there’s that aforementioned West/Z team-up, which confirmed what we’ve all long suspected: Hova did actually retire, he just forget to take Shawn Carter with him. Enter: The Shjips. These San Francisco psych merchants have been steadily building better tracks for a solid six year bent, and West is one of their strongest and most accomplished collections to date. (The word album doesn’t really fit for West--the songs have a tendency to sound a bit better when presented side to side, and yet each of them is best experienced singularly; that way, the sea of conclusions they present remains navigable. It’s the same problem a short story collection creates. History tells us we read books cover to cover, and yet the pieces need you to give them their own private space.) There’s no denying that the Shjips will, for some, forever be relegated to the retail wallpapering category currently teeming with psycho heroes of past and present. That’s just the rules of the game, as much a subtitle as the old Parental Advisory used to be. But every once in a while, pull this one out and really give it a listen. Underneath the drone, distortion and shimmering chords, you’ll find a living center, pulsing with life, as hard as nails. Watching these guys get better is never going to get old. -TS

6. Destroyer - Kaputt

Dan Bejar sings on the final track of Kaputt, “Bay of Pigs (Detail)”, that he “was 20 years old in 1992”. Which places Kaputt in a different context than almost all of the past decade’s 80s nostalgia - or modified nostalgia where New Order and The Swans were as big as they are now remembered, instead of Phil Collins and Ultravox. Here, cultural memory is slammed back to jibe with actual history, and while the lyrics can poke at “Message In a Bottle”, the songs sound closer to Nothing Like The Sun, with all the weird issues of ego, race, pretension, pandering, nostalgia, and “lifestyle music” that can come with. All of it being dealt with by a guy who probably went to punk and indie shows to avoid ever listening to music like this at the time. Kaputt is an absolutely gorgeous record, one that finds the perfect way to present the lyricist side of Destroyer, because all the clusters of words and references don’t feel over-labored, instead they seem to slide along these songs. While Destroyer has been a motherfucker guitar band and a digital-only chamber pop orchestra, “ease” isn’t the kind of word you’d ever have associated with Bejar before now. There is a sense that in making an album like this, combined with the words he does “why’s everybody sing along when we built this city on ruins” - that Kaputt is a refutation of the kind of fake nostalgia records that are everywhere nowadays, the problem being that this essentially the same thing. So instead Kaputt feels like a call for a tempering of nostalgia with the kind of personal desolation every one of the records he’s referencing tried to cover up. This is where the rebellion came to die, and do cocaine and make some money. Those albums are all about the emptiness of being a rock star, but also the emptiness of singing about that. All the big statements, the gestures towards relevance, towards social conscience, and searches for love, all the stuff that dominates the record (even though in Bejar’s hands the words are wrong) were there because you’ve got to sing about something, right? It was music to listen to at dinner, before you broke out the coke, no one was listening anyway. But maybe now we are. -SW

5. White Hills - H-p1 

While Pitchfork (and Pitchfork’s readers, and those White Hills fans who preceded both) have made any number of excellent cases for why the best White Hills is the White Hills you go see live, the argument seems like one lacking in necessity--after all, who says that both can’t be great, even if it’s not in equal measure? (“Great” didn’t all of a sudden get worse than good, did it?) And yes, some of the complaints have merit: the parts during the twelve minute “Paradise” where the Hills start playing with what sounds like the hissing suction straw popularized by dentists does get old around the fourth time you hear the album, and sure, “A Need To Know” seems like little more than baby’s first remix of cool movie scores. But any quibbling is drained of its strength when cast against this album’s four front attack: “The Condition of Nothing”, opening the album with a hellish descent into psychedelic metal oblivion, courtesy of the heaviest guitar available. “No Other Way”, with it’s whirling repetition and unpredictable swell, adding up to the most dynamic interpretation of being drowned since childhood nightmare. And then there’s that Basinski sounding decay at the end of “Monument”, leading up the title track, “H-p1”, and the return of vocals, albeit vocals that lurk behind the savage sonic constructions that opened the album in the first place. Angry, loud, and surprisingly political--it’s okay to forget, but yes, this is a protest album, as strongly felt as they come--“H-p1” serves as the album’s crushing send-off. It’s exciting and rewarding, the most straight ahead “song” of any that the album contains, and it’s a great reminder of the ease with which music can capture emotion at its most blunt, at its most raw. A lot of people got pissed off in 2011. White Hills? They just remembered that anger isn’t supposed to be fucking boring. -TS

4. The Weeknd - House of Balloons

I spent most of 2011 trying to find something--absolutely anything--that could closely approximate the excitement found when “Power” gave way to “All of the Lights” leading up to “Monster”. Nothing. It felt unfair, actually. Kanye’s Twisted Fantasy showed up at the ass end of the year and basically annihilated 2011 for me, it became the thing everybody had to beat, and that trio of songs was the specific height that bar got set at. When the Weeknd came along--as it was for most of us, I found out because somebody else (we all have a Marty Brown, I just happen to have access to the original model) pointed me in that direction--it wasn’t an immediate, drop-to-the-knees revelation. It was mostly just joy that somebody (besides Lonely Island) had figured out that R&B gets way more interesting when it quits trying to appeal to the Steve Harvey’s of the world and starts singing about big asses and fucking somebody’s brains into a pile next to the laundry, which you also should probably have sex with. Fuck it: you're not going to out-seduce the classics in the field, so why not out-vocalize every rapper alive: steal that attitude, and make up a story. That’s what Weeknd did on Balloons, although it wasn’t until “House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls” worked its way into my subconsciousness that I finally caught on to what I was hearing go down. The song suite is one of the strongest cases for the album’s production, a steel rimmed mix of stripper extravaganza and bathroom sanity check reliant on the popularity of stripped down dubstep and naked hip-hop beats amongst film portrayals of insanity. It’s creepy shit, sure--this album failed the can-that-voice-fool-mom test, f.y.i.--but that’s just a byproduct of how well the premise got nailed. It wasn’t a full-on concept album, thankfully. Instead, it split the difference--story, with narrative attention split amongst subjects and audience, a ballsy mix that somehow managed to avoid the danger of turning into a musical or (considering its delivery device) performance art. A song like “Wicked Games” lulls one in to connivance, rolling itself around like infatuation while, in reality, pleading for (and then condemning) attention, including us in the obsessive asides “Tell me you love me/I know you don’t love me”, never pretending that the playing field is an even one. (It’s not for nothing that the perspective is so one-sided--when there is a response, it’s a tinny, child-like one. A strong woman would make this whole thing way too weird to stomach.) “Keep it up” would be the mantra, if, you know, the guy hadn’t already proven himself pretty capable of doing so. -TS

3. EMA – Past Life Martyred Saints

Past Life Martyred Saints is a series of journal entries, indulgent and raw, comprised of rambles and sentences repeated ad nauseum so as to find a hidden meaning between the letters, teasing out ideas through admonishments, fragments of stories, shout-outs to spurned friends, thoughts of self-mutilation, twisted idealization of her grandparents—you know, all the teenage stuff you’re still going through in your early twenties. But, even though she repurposes Bo Diddly’s humblebrag, “I am just 22; I don’t mind dying,” Erika M. Anderson is 29 years old. It’s to her credit, then, that her first solo album in the wake of a break-up with her boyfriend and Gowns collaborator, Ezra Buchla, sounds less like a fragmented emotional exercise, and more like a tightly-coiled emotional assault. Eight out of nine songs are downtempo, and they’re all propelled by a stately death march, punctuated by peals of industrial noise. At one point, EMA lets out a long groan that’s somewhere between a growl, a howl, and a burp—like much of the album, it might be embarrassing if it weren’t so visceral. Even the a capella round, “Coda,” is pretty in spite of itself. On it, droning voices sing, “These drugs are making me so sad”—an observation usually made after time and distance. So maybe Past Life Martyred Saints is Erika M. Anderson allowing her 22-year-old teenage self to whirl and spit within her while externally keeping a rigid front. You know, like an adult. Like an adult who knows that teenage feelings never really go away. -MB

2. Clams Casino - Instrumentals

Clams Casino, a 23 year old producer who works with his collaborators by email, is mostly known as a producer for Lil B. Sonically, his music is hip hop production. The beats are minimal, they build and recede the way a good backing track is supposed to. But Clams Casino is taking that structure and the immediate instinctual understanding that goes with listening to it, and does it with sounds and styles that are alien to hip hop production - the go to comparisons here are Warp records, M83 at their most digitally fuzzy, 70s Tangerine Dream, the late night comedown weirdness of Burial and Photek, Capcom games for the Super Nintendo. All of which it might be assumed Clams Casino probably wasn’t listening to for inspiration. So the sense of haze, the patient approach to bass, the manipulation of voices, the languid keyboards, they’re all decisions that have been come to because he thinks they sound good. While this could be a resume record, as a lot of producer-instrumental comps can be, the final result is a cohesive whole. Which is strange considering how these tracks could have been selected at random from the 200+ on Casino’s hard drive, but the final result is a journey which builds on the track which comes before it, whether it be a wide vista full production or a raw loop of an obvious sample, each of these tracks fare better on their own than in their original intended state as showcases for rappers. Unlike a lot of music that you can apply “haze” to as a descriptor, there is a sense that you can never call Instrumentals a stoner record. It’s too propulsive, too minutely detailed in it’s attempt to shudder off the rails that Casino has laid out for each track. It never does, but it’s the trying that makes it compelling. -SW

1. Shabazz Palaces - Black Up 

One of the only hip-hop albums released on Sub Pop records, quietly promoted with a series of eclectic videos (one a Burnett/Heron mash-up featuring a mass grave and bleeding pigs, the other a whimsical interview featuring the loveliest--and yet most incongruous--pairing imaginable), including songs bearing titles like “A treatease dedicated to The Avian Airess from North East Nubis (1000 questions, 1 answer)" it was no surprise when Black Up turned out weird. Coming at it without knowledge of pedigree--that it was Digable Planet’s Butterfly, grown-up and partnering with a multi-instrumentalist whose father is essentially African music royalty--the album’s initial bite was even fiercer, only eclipsed in audaciousness by Death Grips decision to open their 2011 album with a statement of purpose culled from an extended Charles Manson sample. But whereas Exmilitary ran itself headlong into exhaustion when the actual tracks began, Shabazz Palaces made good on theory: hip-hop’s great frontier might remain in its sound, and in the willingness of its participants to explore. On the image and statement front, you can file Shabazz's avant-garde artiste next to Twisted Dark Fantasy's real time celebrity psychopathy and Big K.R.I.T.'s termite work on today's carpenter--it's been a year of Platonic ideals. The trick to Black Up's success is in its confidence--this is a zealous album, consumed by the creativity of its creators, track after track after track of noise and unpredictability, the only constants those muffled explosions that crowd the ear and decide the tempo, while lyrics laced in double meaning and split second point of view changes swarm through wherever allowed in tight bursts of fire. Nothing sounded like this, and yet the hypnotic quality often worked to overpower the stink of newness, working--as Sasha Frere Jones so aptly put it, Black Up is the “loveliest fog”--to keel its listener over, exhausting and educating. And it accomplished it all--the intellectual satisfaction, the tromp through newness, the challenge, the weird--without lecturing, while still being compelling, still grinding out the necessary rhythm. This was the high wire act every year deserves. -TS

-Marty Brown, Sean Witzke & Tucker Stone, 2012

The Top 30 Albums of 2011: 30-11

30. A$AP Rocky – LIVELOVEA$AP

If you’re listening to LIVELOVEA$AP for quality of rapping, you’re doing it wrong. He may have gotten the three-million dollar label advance, but A$AP Rocky’s rudimentary MC skills are mostly window-dressing for the post-apocalyptic genre-mashing on display. A$AP Rocky is simply a very good poster boy for what, in some ways, is hip-hop’s punk rock moment—what with the A$AP Crew, Main Attrakionz and Lil B collectively imagining rap rebuilt from the basics up, set to soundtracks of slow-motion YouTube videos of the Twin Towers falling (and if this makes Odd Future this era’s Ramones, that’s just the price we have to pay.)  A$AP Rocky’s true gift lies in his Tim Tebow-like ability to rally everyone around him toward a central cause. He utilizes bombastic production from new jack Clams Casino; resurrects and reinvents Screw music ; and makes ugly-ass practitioner Spaceghostpurrp seem respectable. Then, every once in a while, he makes a stunning play himself—most often in the form of a concise, forceful line like his mantra, “I’m a pretty motherfucker.” Pretty being the exact quality needed for a figurehead. -MB 

29. Moon Duo - Mazes

Heavily saturated with noise, striding across abandoned landscapes, Mazes saw the latest phase in Moon Duo’s attempt to figure out how far they want to go with the what they’re able to create. The basics haven't changed: Sanae Yamada sets the tempo with her keyboards and some electric what nots, and then Erik Johnson (of Wooden Shjips fame) rips around alongside on guitar. Vocals are a mix of the back and forth regulars--imperative statements and mumbled nature references--and the songs all tap out around five minutes. As with their previous releases, the album works as both sludgy background palliative (think Brian Eno’s Music For Slow-Motion Stumblings Through Dark, Druggy Basements) as well as old fashioned headphone friendly immersion trip. Months later, this chamber seems inexhaustible. -TS

28. SBTRKT - SBTRKT

The inherent contradiction in dubstep-derived pop is that it pits an inherently insular genre against an extroverted one.  The obvious compromise involves dialing up dubstep’s flashier qualities—enormous bass, toy-box melodies, and metal-machine squall—to meet pop’s exuberance. It’s something that producers Joker and Benga successfully pull off on “The Vision (Breathe In)” and Katy B’s “Katy on a Mission,” respectively, without veering anywhere near Skrillex’s bombast-overload. But, across his first full-length album, SBTRKT’s Aaron Jerome takes a less-traveled route, retaining the subtle pleasures of dubstep (and UK garage, and UK funky) while turning in an unrestrained pop album. Jerome creates a cohesive sound using a wide array of vocalists, including UK funky stalwarts Sampha, Jesse Ware, and Roses Gabor, as well as Little Dragon’s Yukimi Nagano. Their performances revel in a sort of reawakened hope—diva moves from a small party in a dingy basement.  Rather than blowing songs out of the water, each vocalist ducks in and out of SBTRKT’s delicate, intricate framework—gentle encouragement for subtle dancing. -MB

27. Nicolas Jaar - Space Is Only Noise

Nicolas Jaar’s debut album is full of voices: Jaar’s own singing voice, but dialog taken from films in french and english, children playing - sometimes crying - in the distance, diced up breathing and muttering, Ray Charles. There is a physicality as well - running water, shoreline sounds, pingpong balls, hands moving across a piano. Ostensibly, this is a collection downtempo electronic music. There is enough evidence here of that for it to be classified as it and nothing else. But there is a surprising amount of found sound and manipulation of sound here. Things like fake cd skips deleting instruments and replacing them with new ones, playing the same rhythm. The final result is something that resembles nothing else but memory, messy and deliberate, fragmented and cohesive at the same time - reconstructing songs (if you want to call them songs) out of whatever is left after the passage of time. Jaar states “space is only noise if you can see”, elsewhere someone else states “the monuments have been brought down to earth, and made part of the land”. By the end of the album, it seems like memory destroys the divides between things - space/ noise/ land/ sea/ sound/ music/ self/ others. -SW

26. Iceage - New Brigade

Besides mixing up about fourteen kinds of genres, as long as all of those genres involve loud drums and hyphenated words like “post-punk”, New Brigade also made use of its scant runtime to champion the strongest case since Kanye for relying on a band’s preferred listening order. Following the requisite 45 second noise intro, “White Rune” gets down to the business of laying out everything you’re about to experience. One: you’re not going to understand most of the lyrics, and won’t need to. Two: all of these songs are going to end about a minute before you want them to. Three: there is still plenty of room left in your life for a quartet of loud teenagers, especially Danish ones who tell the New York Times they heard New Jersey has good sandwiches, and maybe the next album will be longer? Somebody take a note: the hype is there for a good reason, and this is one of those times. -TS

25. Wild Flag - Wild Flag

Carrie Brownstein is, in many ways, the last guitar god standing. Any and all candidates you want to throw out just seem like shadows of other better players, or are too busy doing other thing to still be in the running. Wild Flag’s songs are written by Brownstein or Mary Timony, and while this isn’t a “guitar album”, what is most enervating about listening to it is to hear their two guitars ricochet off one another, how exciting that can be even in 2011. The songs - Timony’s feel more tuneful, Brownstein’s feel more savage - both are frequently about music in a way most bands haven’t been writing songs since... well rappers rapped about DJs and metal bands sung about metal. It feels like a very organic growth from a band that clearly derives all of its power from playing together - this isn’t a conceptual decision, it’s a byproduct. On “Future Crimes” Carrie Brownstein belts out “If you’re gonna be a restless soul/ then you’re gonna be so so tired/ if you’re gonna give up on the fight/ then I’m gonna call you a liar”, updating her previous “Entertain” for the moment, where the problem is no longer “who’s side are you on” but are you committed? To anything at all? This is organic too. -SW

24. Battles - Gloss Drop

Hey, Battles, what makes you think you’re so funky? Here’s an album made out of the stuff of prog-jazz-funk, by the kind of dudes who understand how to play in 17/39 time, but the end result is something you want to dance to. This is as confounding and exciting as the last time they did it, only without a breakout single to distract from the nature of the thing. This is an entirely physical album, one that’s effect is not aimed towards the musically trained listener’s mind but the body of anyone in earshot. On paper, Battles sounds like a mathletics league, but in execution it’s music that shuts your brain off and has you doing stupid dances to augmented 9ths or some other thing I’ll never understand even after it’s explained to me. Gloss Drop sidesteps any and all conversation about their musical acumen and asks us to dance with somebody, and like Whitney Huston before them, they’ve succeeded. -SW

23. M83 - Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine that Anthony Gonzalez would never get away with any of the shit he does without being french, and it is something you’ve got to wonder about - if culturally you’re allowing for extravagances and gestures you’d scoff at if they were on an album made by some kid from Portland, if you’d really be as into it if it weren’t coming from the place where Air, Daft Punk, and Phoenix defined our parameters of taste. It’s something I’ve thought more and more about M83 because I never used to care - here was the all-digital Kevin Shields, but album-by-album in distorted noise vistas have been replaced by plaintive voices and obliteration has been replaced by naked emotionality. Which isn’t to say that all of that wasn’t present in the M83 to begin with, but it has since taken the forefront. There is a lot more bombast evident in everything, and there are certainly times where you wonder if you’re giving this record a pass because it’s french or if you really like what’s being done as much as you did “Unrecorded”. In execution, though, this is an album that earns every one of its excesses. Even at it’s most ridiculous, there is no artifice here. Or maybe, there is, but it is a particularly gorgeous artifice, one that moves past the pan and scan John Hughes worship of the previous album and goes somewhere a lot more anamorphic. -SW

22. Unknown Mortal Orchestra – Unknown Mortal Orchestra

Despite this year’s R&B-to-indie/indie-to-R&B mass transmigration, few artists have made more palpable arguments in favor of white funk’s continued existence than Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s debut album. The media-shy Portland band finds groove within the whitest of white inspirations—Grateful Dead guitar jangle, 2nd generation garage rock, Peter Frampton—and implants it into indie-rock tropes. “Little Blue House” and album opener “Ffunny Ffrends,” for instance, roll certified break-beats through Vetiver-trademarked freak-folk territory. But it’s the pivotal track, “How Can U Luv Me” that makes a serious case for Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s soul. I imagine it as a corollary to Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings’ “How Long Do I Have to Wait for You?,” with horns subbed out for fuzzy guitar, and in-the-red production in the place of R&B sheen. -MB

21. Gnod - In Gnod We Trust

One of (at least) three Gnod releases this year, In Gnod We Trust is a little over a half hour long, comprised of two songs--”Tony’s First Communion” and “Vatican”--and yet it happens to be one of the heaviest albums on this list. Both tracks are built around repetitive, incredibly loud core sounds--"Tony’s" is some kind of swelling bass, like a gigantic alien heart arytyhmia, whereas “Vatican” is a mix of various howls and some kind of never-ending organ noise--that a variety of other sounds approach and interact with. The core never really merges with those bits, but considering the conceit of the album (the press release that accompanys the music is a fantastic piece of faux-sermon), maybe those core noises are meant to serve as some approximation of monotheistic metal deity. Who can keep up with religion these days? -TS

20. Washed Out - Within and Without

When they start giving out prizes for album-art-that-best-describes-one’s-sound (they probably already do this), one hopes the committee will retroactively give a statue to Ernest Greene for Within and Without. Clambering bodies, eyes closed, sun baked flesh-to-flesh cast against bright white sheets, with private vocals whispered by a tongue that’s pressed directly against your warm earlobe, this is the chillwave album that snuck past people’s visceral standoffishness with that goddamned “chillwave” moniker. (Or “dreampop”. Never has there been a term more suited as a defense for homicide than the word “dreampop”.) Fuck that thinking, though. This is a great electro suite, a languid sonic bath that takes old ESG tones and turns them into the grown up version of a bubble pit. Sure, there’s going to be moments where your ear says “you realize you’re dancing to the sound of somebody dragging a sharpie across a piece of copier paper”, but power through that shit. Nobody ever kissed a negative nelly, and in the future, we’re going to be stabbing all the wallflowers anyway. -TS

19. Eleanor Friedberger - Last Summer

The paradox of making anything is that it either has to be “timeless”, implying that it could exist at any time, at least any time where mass produced electronically recorded music was easily available. It means that it could have been released at any point between now and whatever point we currently don’t feel alienated from (so right now 70s/80s whereas the 50s/60s are starting to be periods we set tv shows. Look they wear ties and drink!). The other approach is to make music of its time - especially rap and dance music, which kind of have right NOW built into their dna simply by the way their music is released and listened to, as opposed to like, indie rock or country or whatever. The problems with both - timeless can mean who gives a shit and current can mean disposable and empty. So Friedberger manages to avoid the pitfalls of both, crafting an album full of songs that could have come out any time in the past 40 years but are still explicitly tied to a place and time. Specifically: last summer, Brooklyn, 2010. It’s hallmark is songs about being lovesick and scrolling through your inbox in bed. A very current experience, one that might be too fleeting to write a great song about. The details here - from the movies that were playing that summer to the giggle of the drug dealer she runs into - are what make Friedberger’s songs have some real emotional weight to them. The other thing is that... well there isn’t a bad song on here, and there isn’t one that doesn’t quietly get better with each listen, that’ll have you singing along with the phrasing you squirmed at on first play. Last Summer feels so alive without really being one of those “snapshot” records that always seem like someone singing their diary entries. Maybe the only one of those that ever actually felt this alive was Illmatic, which is a ridiculous comparison, especially considering what mid-30s Friedberger and 20 year old Nas have in common, but it feels like that vibrant a depiction of someones life, and how often does that happen? -SW

18. Belong - Common Era

Common Era sounds like it was recorded miles away in some sort of cavernous industrial space, the sonic provenance of A Place To Bury Strangers even as the songs have the feel of a better-than-you-remember Slowdive single. This isn’t really shoegaze or shitgaze or even really noise music at all. It’s just a series of delicate pop songs recorded in a way to disguise how that is all they are. Belong’s second album is one that lives and dies on how well the melodies grab you, from under layers and layers of white noise and reverb - and largely the album sticks. Tthe production has a very specific effect, forcing the listener to take each piece as a whole. There are no discernible lyrics, no real dissectable aspects of each song other than drums. Each song is its own fiber optics image, no aspect of it not containing its entire corpus. What makes this different from your average pop album is that deliberate presentation, demanding that it be taken on its terms rather than anyone who listens. Common Era makes what could be a gimmick or a style into intent. -SW

17. Grails - Deep Politics

While Grails has always seemed like the band you think Earth is warming up to become (until you listen to Earth and realize that no, that’s pretty much it), Deep Politics might be the album that puts their name at the forefront when it comes time to talk Western post-rock. It’s merited. “Future Primitive” opens Deep Politics with the latest bastard hybrid of Morricone and death metal, but by the end, the song has splintered open, ejaculating the sorts of LA cosmic guitar riffs that are stock & trade samples for M83 wannabes. After that, the game is on: it’s just a question of which bricks are going into the stew. There’s some fucked up New Age in “Corridors of Power”, stuff that wouldn’t be out of place if you go to a massage parlor where all sessions are concluded by cutting the electricity and abandoning you to your shame. There’s the weird cinematic work of the title track, where the guitar work chases around the idea of public displays of sorrow and revenge--"Deep Politics" indeed--all of which wrap up with the same sort of orchestral cornballing that our brains have been taught to seek true love amongst. Fuck the agrarian transition: this is what we’re talking about when we talk about the Great Leap Forward. -TS

16. Cults - Cults

According to the July 2007 FBI Law Enforcement bulletin, Stockholm syndrome usually involves the following conditions: “captors who do not abuse the victim, a long duration before resolution, continued contact between the perpetrator and hostage, and a high level of emotion.” That sound like a great metaphor for relationships for you? Cults thought so too. Across ten songs that echo 60’s girl groups like The Shangri-La’s, the East-Coast-by-way-of-West-Coast duo’s debut album seizes on the idea of kindness as emotional manipulation. Often the songs sound romantic, but actually live in the grey area between codependency and abuse. They’re accentuated with samples of speeches by Jim Jones and his ilk, all reminiscent of the legions of self-help platitudes that we presently use to define ourselves and our relationships. “I can never heal myself enough for you,” Madeline Follin sings at one point, revealing some hippy-speak unattainable ideal that her man expects of her. Most important, though, is that sound, steeped in the tradition of songs like The Crystals’ “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss).” Cults’ melodies are as seductive as the promise of a new, better life. They hook you. Then they abduct you. Then they indict you. -MB

15. Main Attrakionz - 808s & Dark Grapes II

"I’m a diamond of God,” chants MondreM.A.N., “but a neighbor of Satan.” Like their buddy A$AP Rocky, Main Attrakionz trade in rap that hinges on plainspoken but intricately constructed statements. The Bay Area twosome’s 808s & Dark Grapes II digs into the central theme of post-Biggie gangster rap: the desire to be good, buoyed by the urge to do bad. It’s well-worn material, but statements like Mondre’s nail the angel/devil polarity precisely—it’s the kind of street poetry doesn’t need poetics; it just fucks around with big themes and taps into meaning. Producers like Friendzone, Giorgio MoMurda (have I mentioned how much I love that dude’s name?), and Main Attrakionz’ Squadda B use Clams Casino’s Instrumentals the way that The Grind Date’s producers used The Blueprint as a search engine for ideas. New Age piano, swaths of ambient noise, and castrati choral voices accentuate Squadda and Mondre’s songs, always reaching toward the sublime and sometimes grasping it. -MB

14. Zola Jesus - Conatus

As a cultural genre, goth deserves every sling and arrow thrown at it, if for no other reason than because it’s so gosh darn fun to throw them. (Even the most tolerant would agree: people in vampire clubs are the most humorless of pits.) And by rights, level the criticisms at Conatus all you want, but don’t be deceived into mistaking its gentile qualities--air gulped vocals, synthesized homemade bass lines--for fragility. It’s a classically structured sleight of hand, songs that move past the edge of comprehension; more passion songs about love than love songs passionately sung. The same things that make that aforementioned subculture so trite--its lack of purpose, its hasty retreat into the safe, the make-believe--is what’s entirey absent from the Conatus project. That opening blend of Aphex Twin style gargled electro isn’t ill-thought, not a scam, it’s a promise; this is what we’ll put inside you, what we’ll feed you now. The jagged stripped down, delivered with a history vocal you might not have accepted otherwise. It’s a worthwhile deception. -TS

13. Yuck – Yuck

A lot has been made of how closely Yuck hews to the sound of 90s bands like Dinosaur Jr, Teenage Fanclub, and Yo La Tengo. Thing is, the London-based group is less a tribute band than it is the Platonic ideal of two decades of indie rock. On their self-titled album, Yuck refine the shortcomings and rough edges of their forebears. If that brings to mind a homogenized version of a decades-old sound, well, that may be hard to dispute; but it’s also hardly the point. Yuck seem less interested in sound than they are in songs—that is, they use the components of 90s bands’ sound to craft timeless songs. And, since Yuck doesn’t aim for the emotionally disaffected audience that 90s indie rock targeted, their songs possess the sort of brazen emotional scope and impact that Pavement never attempted. The result is an album that splits between anthems (“Get Away,” “The Wall,” “Georgia,” “Operation”) and ballads (“Suicide Policeman,” “Shook Down,” “Stutter,” “Sunday”), each of which are both familiar and elusive (two of the best qualities music can have, in my opinion). Yuck may not have invented its own sound, but its songs belong to no one else. -MB

12. Katy B - On A Mission

Two of On a Mission’s primary producers, Zinc and Geeneus, are survivors of the UK garage boom of the late 90s and early 00s. Two others, Skream and Benga (who collaborate with Artwork as Magnetic Men), helped define dubstep as a genre. As dubstep and its offshoot UK funky transition into pop forces, and UK garage builds upon the comeback it mounted in 2010, it’s fitting that these four collaborated on Katy B’s debut. On a Mission all but establishes the blueprint for a successful, dubstep-based pop album. The flashpoint is the title track, “Katy on a Mission,” which churns with gnarly synths and muffled vocal clips before dropping a monstrous bass pulse. Benga’s production provides a British parallel to US pop’s current house obsession—the way it establishes momentum with just a few chords and a propulsive bass line has echoes in Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” for example. Of course, this is Katy B’s album. While she’s not the flashiest vocalist, Katy B excels in the exact area that dubstep requires: rhythm. She utilizes syncopation and vocal changes at a level hinted at on, say, SBTRKT, but mostly absent on dubstep’s crossover tracks—most of whom feature house-indebted divas. The result is a resolutely British album, rooted in tradition, with a firm idea of the near-future. -MB

11. Das Racist - Relax

Recurring themes on Relax, including guest verses - laughter, myriad Terror Squad references, not taking shit too seriously, taking shit seriously, money, how people in rap make money, how people around rap make money, 90s pop culture references, 00s pop culture references, literature, twitter, women, honesty, honestly relating to women (who may or may not have a pool), race, real life vs what rappers talk about, cultural relativism, crypto-Kanye references (what did you think “Michael Jackson” was about?), food, white castle, language (“half internet, half high school cafeteria shit”), meta-commentary by song title and sequence placement despite lyrical content or tone (“Booty In the Air” “Happy Rappy”, “Brand New Dance”), how rapping gets boring, even when you’re only a couple years in, the internet, recently dead musicians, being the best rappers alive. The last one is only implied. The criticisms of Relax have largely been that it feels more mainstream than the two previous free releases and that it’s weird that “Rainbow in the Dark” is being reused without any alteration. And yeah, both of those criticisms are valid and in some way true. The other big one, indicated by the first two examples, is that it felt like Das Racist didn’t seem to have the worldbeating urge that seemed to drive them to drop Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down, Man back to back. Which is bullshit, and exactly the reactions you hear on everybody’s major label debut, or whatever - the first album they’ve charged money for. Relax isn’t the album that people wanted/expected, it’s where Das Racist is right now. And thank god they’re not at all interested in giving a fuck about who’s listening, or what they want, even as they talk about who’s listening. -SW

-Marty Brown, Sean Witzke & Tucker Stone, 2012