Songs of Pain and Longing: Reviews of Closer, Damien Rice’s ‘O’, Jeff Buckley, Midival Punditz
My no. 1 fave track right now is Blower’s Daughter by Damien Rice. My other no. 1 (ha, get it? two no. 1′s!) is Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley. And my third no. 1 (whew! I must have flunked math for sure) is Dark Escape by Midival Punditz.
I’d play these three songs back to back all day long – if only my daughter didn’t insist on doing the same with Yeh Lamhe, and my son with, hmm, Yeh Lamhe.
Anyway, speaking of the first no. 1, Blower’s Daughter. It’s a mindblowing ballad with some of the most beautiful lyrics ever.
You’d expect that from Damien Rice, the Irish singer-songwriter who used to front Radiohead. But in this song, indeed, the whole album, ‘O’, he exceeds himself.
‘O’ is the album he wrote, produced, mixed, and performed all on his own, when his band and music company both refused to go the way he chose, which was more acoustic, more real, less ‘arranged’, less of the typical ‘alt rock’ formula sound – which is solid, filled-in arrangements with strong percussion and simpler rifts, changes and harmonies.
You can almost see why the label and his other bandmembers parted ways over his choice: ‘O’ is a very idiosyncratic album by commercial music standards (and despite its categorization, ‘alt rock’ today is just as commercial as mainstream ‘poprock’, the same way that lit-fic is as commercial a category as thrillers or fantasy).
The tracks are more about loss, longing, expressing inner feelings, baring the soul, rather than entertaining, enlightening. It’s a collection of raw, honest songs, sort of like the musical version of open heart surgery.
Its very personal sound comes partly from Rice’s own style, which is very Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, Lisa Hannigan (a fellow Irish singer who also features on some of the tracks on ‘O’), even 10,000 maniacs (remember them?), Natalie Imbruglia.
As my daughter put it, “a male Dido but with wierder music.”
Well put actually. Better than Dido (though I love Dido on a rainy day and a long drive – I mean her music, not her) and yes, the music can get a bit weird at times. Rice even uses disharmonies deliberately, to underscore the themes of disharmony between people, I guess. The results aren’t always successful, in my opinion, but they’re always worth listening to, and often, like with Blower’s Daughter, Cold Water, Cannonball, Lonelily, Sweet Avenue, Amie, and Perfume – hell, virtually all the album’s tracks – they’re truly memorable.
Give ‘O’ a chance, it’ll grow on you.
Or you’ll hate it the first time, and the tenth time you’ll hate it ten times more. In which case, move on, sister (or brother). There’s always Backstreet Boys.
Incidentally, when Rice’s label and band disagreed with him on the type of songs he wanted to do, he just walked away from Radiohead, bought some recording equipment home, and did the whole album in his bedroom, even mixing it right there on his comp.
You can hear the simplicity and purity in every song. I think it’s that stripped down purity that gives ‘O’ its uniqueness.
It’s an album that hasn’t been ‘studiofied’, or over-produced. It reminds me so much of the first Tracy Chapman album, or Youssou N’Dour, and so many other great acts who could have soared like Johnny Livingstone Skygull if only they’d been allowed to roam free and wild as their talent required.
He was vindicated when the album went on to stay on the Irish music charts for a full solid year.
About Jeff Buckley, well, he’s more of the same, viz, soulful voice, heartrending melodies, and songs of loss and longing.
I don’t like everything he’s done. But Hallelujah ranks now as one of my all-time fave tracks. Despite the title, it has nothing to do with religion, unless it’s the religion of love and humanity we’re talking about.
But it’s a great, great song. Epic.
It’s used as the background track during the bowout sequence of the season finale of Season 1 of The O.C., the hot new TV series on DVD I was telling you about.
It’s one of those songs I can’t live without. It just makes the world more bearable, somehow, if you know what I mean.
It’s everything I want to say but can’t find the words for.
It does to me what Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne did when I first heard it – which was played by a guy named Cedric Serpes, a fellow copywriter in an ad agency named Chaitra back in, oh, I don’t know, 1985? – blew my mind and shot my spark plugs and made me see stars and the sun and the planets all aligned in a row all at once.
Other Jeff Buckley tracks you might like are Grace, Last Goodbye, Striptease, and Everybody Here Wants You. There are plenty more, so if you like his sound, you’re in for a real treat.
As for Midival Punditz, Dark Escape, well it’s a house music number, very evocative, moody, mildly erotic. Which is probably why I heard it first as background in a scene in a strip’s club.
I’m going to check out more by these guys, but even as a one-off, this is pretty cool.
It’s got a real mujra hall feel. And I say that even though I’ve been exactly once to a mujra hall (well, that’s one night, during which I toured a half-dozen mujra halls/dance bars across Bombay for an article on them). The article appeared in Gladrags (commissioned by them) and it was later reprinted in a certain, ahem, New York magazine which shall remain nameless.
Nope, I wasn’t in the strip club, haven’t ever been in one, not sorry to say. Though I’ve nothing against them. Just never been that desperate for work, frankly. And I really don’t know if people would actually pay money to see me take my clothes off – my wife sees me do it every night and she never throws so much as a five-rupee note!
Just kidding…
Seriously, though, the Midival Punditz track is used as background in a key scene in the new film Closer.
In fact, that’s where I heard Damien Rice properly for the first time too.
Blower’s Daughter plays over the opening sequence (and the ending sequence) of Closer, and from the very first sounds of that bluesy acoustic guitar, I was hooked.
The mood it sets for the film is so perfect, you’d think it was composed for the film. Those key lines, ‘Can’t take my eyes off of you…can’t take my mind off of you…’ capture the film’s primary theme – obsessive love – so beautifully.
Closer is the film that the Indian Censor Board has allegedly refused to certify. Which means that, without a certificate, even an ‘A’ (for Adults) label, the film won’t see release in India.
The strange thing is that Closer doesn’t have any real nudity or simulated sex. Sure, there’s this sequence in a strip club where we see a few topless dancers. But not much else.
Almost every sexual act is cut away, so we see the characters talking about having sex, or talking after having had sex (and both times with all their clothes on), and that’s it.
But where Closer does become potentially offensive for our Censor Board types is with its brutal honesty. It’s a film that’s about love shown raw, real, brutally true.
It’s about emotional nakedness, not physical nakedness. And that can be far more shocking and unsettling than just a pair of tits onscreen or a bare bum wagging.
The film is a heartbreaking love/hate story. Hate, because all love stories have to be about hate as well, haven’t they?
It’s based on the play of the same name, basically a four-actor piece. So most of the scenes are fairly stagey, with two people standing or walking about talking.
Talking about each other, sex, love, death, obsession, life…the things two attractive people of the opposite sex usually talk about in their most honest moments.
It’s about how we love, then screw it up, then try to unscrew-it up, and succeed, or fail.
About how we manipulate each other, use one another, deceive, betray – all for love. For need.
Because sex is greed. And greed is good. As well as bad.
It’s a beautiful, tragic film. Breaks your heart, especially when that Damien Rice song comes on again at the end and you realize that it’s over, that these four fools have gone round in the merry go round of love and come back to square one, and what the eff do they have to show for it?
Older and wiser. And sadder.
Beautiful. Brutal. True. Naked. In your face.
Brilliantly written – you’ll laugh at some of the lines, even though the things being said are so awful. You’ll want to cry even though the people onscreen are making such buffoons of themselves.
See it. You’ll think twice before hurting someone you love after you do.
And if you don’t, well, hey, at least you’ll know why it got banned in India.
Because we can take sex, we can take violence, we can even take sleaze in the name of entertainment.
What we can’t take, is honesty.
This entry was posted on Friday, April 8th, 2005 at 11:06 pm. It is filed under Ashok.
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