Cellar Door

First off, I want to apologize if you saw the title and immediately got excited about Donnie Darko. I would have. Unfortunately, the title of today's post is the subject's album title. I hope you'll read anyway; I'll probably talk about Donnie Darko after the normal blog topic.

Moving on, today's Music of the Day is Cellar Door, by John Vanderslice. This album came to me by way of the public library, having stumbled upon it one day at random. I almost immediately claimed it for checkout, because of A) the aforementioned Donnie Darko connection, and B) I had no idea who John Vanderslice was at the time.

Enough with the history lessons; that's what Wikipedia is for. Let's talk about the music.

This is something of a pop album, but it's not really pop in the sense that, say, the New Pornographers are pop. These songs are very tightly controlled, to the point that the tension affects the mood, and consequently the entire sound is unfriendly without being dark. It isn't much like the Church or the Cure, but I would place his sound somewhere along the lines of Echo and the Bunnymen.

Cellar Door is hardly unlistenable; it's a pretty good album. However, it's not an easy listen, as the album is as stern and tense as any pop album I've listened to in recent memory. The lyrics are good, very good in places; the soundscape is busy but cooperative. The instruments are very rough, and the percussion almost industrial at times, but everything is moving - or at least being pulled - in the same direction. Listening to this album, though, gives a person all of the tension and very little of the resolution. It is sort of a strange effect, an album with such clearly defined emotional boundaries, but it's not a failure by any means.

There are some songs I care for more than others, here; 'June July' isn't bad, but it's hardly an inspired choice for an album closer. The opener, 'Pale Horse', isn't horribly dramatic, but it does set the tone well. My favorite song on this album, 'Promising Actress', is possibly the most well-resolved song. (It also happens to be about David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, one of the more interesting movies I've seen, a pretty good film but not Lynch's magnum opus.)

In short: interesting if not pleasing. Listenable but maybe not for you? Hard to say.

In Coincidental News:
It was J.R.R. Tolkien who said that 'cellar door' was one of the most pleasing phrases in the English language, but I'm willing to bet that I'm not the only one who heard this idea first from Donnie Darko. Lately, I've been hearing a lot of music from the soundtrack of this film. Recently I heard Gary Jules's rendition of "Mad World" at a bar, and on Sunday I heard the Church's "Under the Milky Way". (Both great songs.) I also heard the Echo and the Bunnymen song "The Killing Moon" (?) somewhere, recently, though it escapes me at present. Maybe it just means I should watch Donnie Darko again; I suspect the film is a little dated, and probably less mature than I want to believe, but I'd be hard pressed not to encourage anyone to watch it. I suppose there is a greater debate here, whether it's best to look at something objectively or to enjoy it in spite of its flaws, but this blog has gone on long enough for one day.

In Other News:
I think my foot is good enough for capoeira again. Yays!

This weekend should be fun if everything doesn't happen at once.