If you’re a Nightwish fan in 2015, I have a question about your fingernails. Are they chewed ragged, or have you gnawed them away completely by this point?
The last four years have seen levels of melodrama and self-parody normally reserved for Manowar. An uninspired studio album. A failed feature film. A frontwoman who left the band so abruptly there’s still skid marks around the microphone stand. A drummer forced into retirement by chronic insomnia. The announcement that Richard Dawkins would feature on the new album. A concept album about Scrooge McDuck. Tuomas crying because people had the cheek to listen “Elan” on February 10 instead of February 13 like he’d planned.
The stars were aligned for Endless Forms Most Beautiful to be the most pretentious and obnoxious Nightwish album to date. It isn’t. Honestly, sometimes I think it could stand to be a bit more pretentious and obnoxious.
New vocalist Floor Jansen is kept in cruise control mode, and her performance lacks both Tarja’s emotion and Anette’s chest-belted power. The production is scaled back to match, with a less savage guitar attack and quieter drums. Into the gaps flow an increased number of orchestral parts, mixed with Celtic instrumentation from new member Troy Donockley.
“Shudder Before the Beautiful”, an animated uptempo rocker similar to “Dark Chest of Wonders.” There’s a quote from Dickie Dawkie, Pip William’s trademark orchestration, and then Emppu Vuorinen’s guitars crash in to heart-racing effect. There’s duelling guitar/keyboard solos…when was the last time a Nightwish album had those? A powerful start to the album.
Lead single “Elan” is a delicate and fragile song. This song about triumphant human endeavor seems more like a guttering candle that could go out at any moment. “Alpenglow” works the same formula to better effect, featuring the album’s strongest chorus. Songs in a similar vein include “My Walden” and “Edema Ruh”. The first is a chance for Donockley to go hogwild on his uillean pipes and so forth. The second is a tribute to the novels of Patrick Rothfuss.
The album’s heavier side has some of the deadness and dryness we’ve come to expect. So many bands have done the “Rammstein + orchestra” thing by now that it’s hard to muster much excitement, no matter who’s singing it. “Weak Fantasy” has an Latin-influenced middle section to break up the chugging. “Yours Is An Empty Hope” is the album’s fastest song, with lots of vocal hysterics from Marco Hietala and another nod to “Dark Chest of Wonders” in the riff development.
“The Greatest Show on Earth” doesn’t quite pay for its 24 minute lodging, but it’s a strong song, telling the story of the evolution of life via symphonic metal and spoken parts by Richard Dawkins. It’s a bit like “A Song of Myself” from the last album – the “song” gets in, does it’s thing, gets out, then we drift off into a land of pure symphony and sectional development, unencumbered by the need to restate a refrain or remind the listener of what has gone before.
At worst, Nightwish is holding steady – an achievement, considering the battering of the last few years. At best, they’ve exceeded Imaginaerium and are approaching Dark Passion Play in quality, although Endless Forms Most Beautiful lacks an epic as good as The Poet and the Pendulum, or radio fodder as good as Amaranth.
It’s clearly not a return to the band’s glory days, though. I think we all know what needs to happen if that’s to be the next step.
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Tim and Eric’s comedy is about weapon-grade awkwardness. They’re the kings of off-kilter timing, inexplicable malapropisms, garishly slapdash special effects, and reaction shots that last two seconds too long. Their style resembles banal daytime TV fed through some sort of cosmic dislocator so that everything is 10-15% off.
Although in this case, it’s more like a banal direct to video movie. The premise: the Schlaaang corporation gives Tim and Eric a billion dollars to make a movie, which they squander on diamonds, helicopter rides, and a $500,000 a week spiritual guru. When they deliver a ridiculous 3 minute film starring a Johnny Depp impersonator, an enraged Tommy Schlaaang orders them to pay back the billion dollars. Destitute, they end up hiding at a derelict mall while ducking Schlaaang’s thugs.
Tim and Eric adjust to their new home, which is filled with such oddities as a used toilet paper store, a sword salesman who earns money by not selling swords, and a man-eating wolf that stalks the food court. They make friends, and enemies, and learn an important lesson: sometimes you gotta bring knives to a gunfight.
Some scenes perfectly nail the uncomfortable Tim and Eric vibe (there’s an almost impossible to watch scene where Eric starts to loudly masturbate off-camera, and it doesn’t let us go until he reaches his climax). Other scenes drag like hell, and have little energy. There’s a scene where Tim and Eric are trying to buy the mall from a neurotic Will Ferrell, and he forces them to watch Top Gun not once but twice. It probably sounded hilarious on paper. On screen, you’re thinking “okay…feel free to go somewhere with this any time, boys.”
This movie exposes the limitations of the Tim and Eric format, which is that they have trouble sustaining interest in their schtick for long periods of time. They were at their best in Awesome Show, Great Job, where they bombarded you with sketch after sketch. While you were still recovering from a left hook, in swings the right. But the artistic strictures of film means they have to keep scenes going, and going, and going…and the cider goes flat. They rely on the unexpected, and too much of the unexpected means your tastes adjust downward like a pupil under a bright light. Their ironic kitsch starts to seem like genuine kitsch. Their awkward pauses and affectations seem like random stupidity.
It’s fun to be in Tim and Eric’s world, but honestly you don’t want to be there for long. Billion Dollar Movie is like spending 94 minutes on a roller coaster. Fun at first, but after a certain point you just want to get off.
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Watching an old interview with the Sex Pistols can be funny. We’ll get a spiel about how crazy they are, how they embody burn-the-bridges musical terrorism…then the interview starts, and they seem disappointingly normal. Nothing ages as poorly as rebellion. They were ahead of their time, but not too far ahead. Both Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious would look dull at a 21st century Hot Topic. Time has murdered their shtick.
If anything looks bizarre to a modern viewer, it’s the pomaded, coiffed, tweed-wearing creatures in the interviewer’s chair.
Scott Alexander once said “Virtue is appropriated by people wanting to signal smug superiority. Others start by condemning the signaling, but move on to condemn virtue.” Punk rock was like that. It started out as a reaction against the pretensions of popular music at the time (17 minute progressive rock opuses about walruses mating, and all that), but soon became an all-out attack against music itself.
Punk rock tore down every idea about music, especially that it has to be good. Having standards became an indicator of poseurdom. Can you play your instrument correctly? Suspicious. Do you sing on key? Doubly suspicious. Do you have lots of fans? That’s the worst of all. Might as well write “fake punk” and “sellout” on your guitar case.
Which is funny, considering that the authenticity of the Sex Pistols is far from unimpeachable. Yes, their image was calculated, and they were stage-managed. To hear Malcolm McLaren tell it, they were little more than a boy band formed to promote his clothing line. But maybe even trying to be authentic is inauthentic. Maybe the realest band is actually the fakest band, and vice versa, and thus the Ouroborus eats its own tail.
“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” Johnny Rotten sneered at the final Sex Pistols show, in San Francisco. The band was coming apart at the seams. They were wrapping up a tour where McLaren had deliberately booked them for venues in the deep south, to maximize the controversy (and if one of them got blasted to death by a drunk redneck!). Sid Vicious was already picking up speed into a terminal death spiral. He was a few days away from a valium and methadone-induced coma. If this is real music, maybe fake is better.
Even if the Pistols were “real”, most of their fans weren’t. One gets the feeling that the Pistols were growing disillusioned by the social movement they were meant to be heading up. The Winterland promoter estimated that only about 10-15% of the audience were genuine punks. The rest of them were just normies who’d come to see the freaks. For the average person in that crowd, it was just a kind of zoo where you can throw food at the animals.
Maybe it’s not a coincidence that after the Sex Pistols ended, Johnny Rotten terminated what seemed like a prosperous career as Iggy Pop v2.0, and started releasing utterly unmusical albums as Public Image Ltd. Maybe he wanted to plant his flag firmly on the side of rebellion, and the Sex Pistols weren’t breaking enough soil for his taste. People will be listening to the Pistols record for far longer than anything PIL will ever release, but that’s a small price to pay for the most valuable currency of punk rock: authenticity.
Johnny Rotten once said “only the fakes survive”. Which he himself did, in a way. But not very well.
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