War Of The Worlds

I've always been a big fan of The War Of The Worlds ever since seeing the 1953 version on T.V. one night when I was a kid, thus I was looking very forward to seeing what Steven Spielberg would do with it. Since Sarah had no interest in going, I headed over to the theater alone earlier tonight and caught the 10:25 showing of the new version (which was missing the beginning definite article), unable to wait for the weekend.

Holy cow.

I'd heard that Spielberg's intention was not a "straight remake" of the 1953 version of the movie, but rather a modern re-telling of H.G. Wells' original telling of the story. What I was not prepared for at all for just how dark and unsettling this would be on the big screen. War Of The Worlds isn't the kind of escapist "America (Fuck Yeah)!" moviemaking you might be expecting at all - in fact this isn't so much a "war" as a fucking rout (to paraphrase a line spoken by an ancilliary character). There is also something about those Tripod machines that just gets under your skin and won't leave: that weirdly-classical yet alien look to them, the roving heat-rays that can flash-cremate dozens of extras at a time, or (most likely) that soul-shattering siren of doom they emit just before they engage in battle -- a minor key death knell played at stupendous volume.

I also like that there are no overall explanations of what the hell is really going on while it happens: what little you know of the war is either inferred instinctually or by overheard conversations which may or may not be correct. That, and a host of visual cues (some of them subtle, some of them a bit more blatant) bring to mind the mind-numbing chaos of September 11 - that familiar helpless sense of complete shock and stunned surprise was replicated in a style that I'd normally describe as "beautifully" if it didn't feel morbid to say so.

There are also some hints of past Spielberg achievements for those who love looking for these things (Jurassic Park is the most noticeable of the referential nods here) as well as enough Independence Day-styled widescreen destruction for two movies. With much of the staggering devastation used as a backdrop (as if seen out of the corners of our eyes rather then thrust into the foreground), Spielberg keeps a sense of dread and doom -- both alien-derived and otherwise -- at near-redline level throughout the first two-thirds of the movie. This more immediate and claustrophobic fear feels strange for a movie like this and probably comes to us thanks to War Of The Worlds never pulling back for a look at The Big Picture as most films of its ilk tend to do -- in a fashion reminscent of Signs, we stay with one family the whole way through the movie, but this time the characters are outside the safety of their home and fending for themselves in a world turned completely upside down.

A couple of points before I finish about two issues a lot of people will likely have with War Of The Worlds...

First, of course, is the movie's ending, which is done in exactly the same way Wells intended. Even to those familiar with the original book or movie, this ending cannot help feeling like a sudden cop-out following the incredible carnage wreaked almost nonstop beforehand (there is also a secondary plot resolution which is what really strained plausibility for me, but it was forgivable in the wake of what I'd seen until that point).

The second issue is the main character being played by the new favorite American celebrity pinata Tom Cruise (thanks to his propensity to come off as a raging gigglemuppet when he steps off-camera and interacts with the real world). While I do wish to hell the man would just vanish into some ethereal celebrity Asgaard when he walks off of a movie set, Cruise still has the ability to surprise me from time to time with his acting or his choice of roles. This time around, I am relieved to say that he plays a human being instead of a cartoon -- in fact, his character is a selfish, rather gladly average witted asshole who is anything but a hero figure when the shit hits the fan. While the usual movie cliches abound when dealing with Cruise's relationships with his estranged children, Cruise still comes off likable and believable in the end.

Needless to say, I highly recommend this flick. Happy Fourth!

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Roger Waters

The writing may have been on the wall ever since the shambolic end of the Animals tour in July of 1977, but it was nearly six years later in the anticlimactic aftermath of The Final Cut that Pink Floyd seemed to disappear for good. Of course, there are many who believe that the band never truly reappeared after this time frame, but that is another matter for another forum.

During the period between the release of The Final Cut in March 1983 and the appearance of A Momentary Lapse Of Reason in September 1987, every member of the "classic" 1970s Pink Floyd lineup released a solo album (in many cases their second) and pursued a musical career outside the Pink Floyd framework with varying degrees of passion and success. Also, being the 1980s and all, each member also dabbled in the synthpop genre, with universally middling-to-nonexistent commercial results.

While the subsequent synth-dominated solo efforts of keyboardist Richard Wright and drummer Nick Mason (which we'll examine in a special edition of this column next week) could kindly be described as "bland" and "harmless," such adjectives fail in the face of perhaps the most infamous of all the 80's solo Floyd albums - the second solo effort by the band's estranged mastermind Roger Waters.

While he had found a measure of success in the spring of 1984 with his weirdly tuneless (not to mention grossly self-centered) debut solo release The Pros And Cons Of Hitch-Hiking, it was with 1987' s Radio K.A.O.S. that Waters found himself going head-to-head with his ex-bandmates what what, in retrospect, was the worst-possible album to challenge them with on any grounds.

Slated to be one of the dominant albums of the summer, Radio K.A.O.S. appeared in June of 1987, accompanied by a big push from Columbia Records at radio, print and MTV. Realizing early on that he would be fighting a publicity war against his ex-bandmates, Waters finally doffed his carefully-constructed anonymity by appearing in T.V. interviews, magazine articles and even in his own music videos. In spite of his newfound accessibility, however, Waters was never able to sell the idea of Radio K.A.O.S. to the public (though there sure was a lot of appetite for sniping comments at his ex-colleagues and vice-versa), and he could only watch in frustration as the record just grazed the bottom end of the Top 50 while two cuts ("Radio Waves" and "Sunset Strip") briefly reached the Top 20 of the Rock Airplay chart before dropping straight away.

Perhaps the biggest problem Joe Public had with Radio K.A.O.S. was the sound of the record itself. While The Pros And Cons Of Hitch-Hiking was essentially a familiar-sounding sonic continuation of The Wall and The Final Cut, K.A.O.S. was steeped in late 1980's white-boy funk and pop music and the music is dominated by busily chittering drum machines and chiming, buzzy synthesizers carried along on upbeat, propulsive rhythms -- a totally alien-sounding construction that sounds like nothing else in Waters' canon before or since.

While the reunited Pink Floyd album A Momentary Lapse Of Reason was certainly no one's idea of a spartan, back-to-basics rock record, at least that machine-made monster still managed to sound enough like a Pink Floyd record in the end to keep the fans interested -- with K.A.O.S., Waters sounded like a guest vocalist on his own remix album.

The other drawback to Radio K.A.O.S. (and this is a big one) was the concept itself, which was quite possibly the most harebrained in the history of the form. Imagine if you will a fusion of The Who's Tommy and Planet P Project's Pink World with a dash of the 1938 radio broadcast of The War Of The Worlds thrown in towards the end. Even Waters himself seemed aware of the unweildy nature of his narrative -- while declining an opportunity to discuss the backstory of the album with MTV, he uttered the immortal words: "I can't, it will sound crazed."

Happily, there was an silver lining in this whole mess for the ex-Floyd leader -- while he acknowledged during interviews that the album, as a narrative, was "doomed to failure," the idea of a teenaged Stephen Hawking with the power to destroy the world (that is, until he watched the original Live Aid concert and got all touchy-feely instead) worked far better live than on record. Working around the time constraints of the vinyl/CD/cassette canvas, Waters utilized screened film/computer graphics elements, selected hits from the Floyd canon and a couple of additional songs that were not present on the released version of Radio K.A.O.S. to expand the narrative and flesh out the themes of the record. A true multimedia presentation, Radio K.A.O.S. On The Road enabled Waters to "sell" his ideas to the audience far easier than he ever could have done otherwise.

Aye, but this is where we come to the final rub ... the unkindest of all, you might say: very few people ever saw the Radio K.A.O.S. On The Road tour. While Waters' name and history might have been enough to sell more tickets in a year without any competition from his ex-bandmates, that year was not 1987. In many cases, tickets for the reunited Pink Floyd tour were actually put on sale weeks before K.A.O.S. was even released, and the resulting overwhelming stampede towards the familiar brand name stomped the Radio K.A.O.S. tour into a bloody smear at the box office. Disheartened and bitter, Waters retreated from the road for what turned into a twelve year layoff, with only his excellent 1992 solo album Amused To Death (his only release that truly stands up to any of his work with Pink Floyd) to fill the gap.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Berlin

In celebration of the forthcoming reunion of the classic Pink Floyd lineup at the Hyde Park Live8 concert on July 2, there will be a subtle shift in the subject matter of the Sunday Synthpop Brunch in the next couple of weeks as we focus on bands or music with a Floyd connection in one form or another.

Now, you may be looking at this pic to the left right now and wondering what on earth these three people have to do with Pink Floyd, but we'll get to that part later. Some exposition needs to be taken care of first.

Their career now following a hopeful upward trajectory, Berlin had achieved a mainstream breakthrough in 1984 thanks to the single "No More Words" which had nearly cracked the Top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100 that spring. However, this breakthrough had come at a cost: the confidence of their leader, bass player and primary songwriter John Crawford. The pressure on Crawford to succeed had been mounting ever since Berlin made their unlikely breakthrough in 1983, a surge in popularity which was equally attributable to a) being the right band in the right place at the right time, and b) the all-powerful promotional element of controversy.

It was around February of 1983 that Berlin's debut EP Pleasure Victim, recorded on the cheap and initially released on the independent label Enigma (before being picked up for distribution by then-newbie Geffen Records), suddenly became a hot property. At first, all of the commotion surrounding the band was due to the absurdly button-pushing lyrics sung by Crawford and lead singer Terri Nunn on the single "Sex." While it might seem comparatively tame by modern lyrical standards, the relentless, seedy porno movie atmosphere of the track combined with such immortal lines as "Slip and slide in your wet delight, feel the blood flow" and "Wrap your legs around mine and ride me tonight " caused a full-blown national epidemic of hand-wringing only recently matched by a certain wardrobe malfunction at some football game early last year. No, I jest -- barely anyone heard "Sex" since only a handful of stations in the United States would even touch it, but those who did hear it spread the word and the band found themselves attaining a national cult following, which then mushroomed considerably following the release of the similarly pulsating (but much more radio-friendly) europop of "The Metro." With a crucial assist from tastemaker MTV (who gave the track virtually blanket airplay during the second third of 1983), as well as an appearance at the 1983 US Festival, Berlin suddenly found themselves poised for stardom.

Released the following spring, the Mike Howlett-produced Love Life represented a compromise of sorts between Crawford and the powers that be at Geffen Records, who had now become the band's full-time landlords. When first presented with the album masters, the label wasn't overly enthusiastic with the results and wondered where the hit single was. To help in this process, Geffen tapped noted disco producer George Moroder and his protegé Richie Zito to produce a couple of rejected songs from the Howlett sessions -- "No More Words" and "Dancing In Berlin." The results of that idea, as mentioned above, was the band’s first verifiable major hit. Score one for Geffen.

While Crawford may have been understandably upset that Geffen was already focused on recouping their investment and turning Berlin into a hits machine rather than letting the band grow at their own pace, he certainly couldn't argue with the commercial results of Moroder and Zito's interaction, either: in comparison to "No More Words," the Howlett production "Now It's My Turn" peaked at a lowly No. 74. Love Life also didn't maintain its sales pace for long -- despite being certified gold, the album represented a drop off from the platinum sales level achieved by its predecessor.

It was during 1985 that, according to Crawford, Berlin was adrift without a rudder. Instead of listening to where his heart thought the band's music should be going, Crawford began listening to what other people (namely, record executives and producers) were telling him instead. After all, he reasoned, they were right about "No More Words," weren't they? Writing on his recently-started website, Crawford attributes the dismissal of guitarist Ric Olsen, as well synth players Matt Reid and David Diamond (the latter a key collaborator in the band's early sound) during this period to the musical uncertainty and additional pressure to succeed spawned by Love Life. As the founding member of Berlin, Crawford was fiercely protective of his position as the leader, even though he was increasingly relying on the consultations of others who were now steering him away from the sound of "The Metro" and towards a more mainstream rock feel. With the three "other" members gone, and the band now down to a core trio of Crawford, Nunn and drummer Rob Brill, it was time for Berlin to make a move to the much-vaunted "next level."

As it turns out, that "next level" was reached the following year when Berlin appeared on the soundtrack to the movie Top Gun. One of the great "synergistic" marketing exercises of the decade, Top Gun absolutely dominated the summer of 1986 in movieplexes, and was matched in success by its Big 80's bonanza of a soundtrack album. Specifically engineered to be a monster, Top Gun performed beyond even the highest expectations of Columbia Records: released in May of 1986, it ran over the competition like a bulldozer, spending over a month at number one on Billboard's album chart, staying listed on said chart for 93 weeks (i.e., all the way through 1987 and even into 1988) and selling somewhere north of 9 million copies.

Perhaps moreso than any other record from that time period, the Top Gun soundtrack is one of those "guilty pleasures" that is filed well out of sight these days by people who wish to keep their musical reputations in one piece (cough cough). The shame with owning up to liking Top Gun isn't so much the songs themselves being so brainlessly, diabolically catchy, but the production on the album itself. Talk about a record that just screams 1986 -- Top Gun was loaded down with some of the most cheesetastic production values to ever grace a soundtrack album, mixed red-hot and designed to be cranked up louder than hell on your IROC-Z stereo system.

It should be noted that Top Gun was as its sales peak at the same time that Berlin's contribution "Take My Breath Away," was riding high on mutliple charts worldwide. A stately synth ballad that, like everything else on Top Gun, sounded impossibly huge on the radio, "Take My Breath Away" was an immediate across-the-board smash that took the band all the way to the #1 position on the Hot 100 and provided the kind of "new album setup" most bands (or labels) would kill for. However, even moreso than their experience with "No More Words," this success was highly tainted. Most crushingly for the increasingly-unsure Crawford, "Take My Breath Away" was not really a Berlin song at all - it was simply Terri Nunn singing a song produced and arranged by Georgio Moroder (him again!) and written by Moroder and Tom Whitlock. Crawford and Brill did not even perform on the track, and aside from the wall-to-wall synths, "Take My Breath Away" had little in common with Berlin's material, old or new. One wonders exactly why it was credited to Berlin at all.

Still, with an international #1 single to kick off the proceedings, Geffen figured they had a guaranteed smash on their hands and released Berlin's second full length album Count Three And Pray a month later. Representing a near-total change in musical direction for the band, Count Three And Pray featured Nunn's increasingly-assured and dynamic vocals in a setting not terribly unlike the songs on the Top Gun soundtrack -- thick beds of rock guitar chords and glistening synth chords pinned down by that intricately-created, larger than life 1980's drum-and-bass sound that was all the rage in those days (best evidenced on the track "Heartstrings"). There was also a lot of well known names on hand to lend assistance (Ted Nugent, Elliot Easton, Patrick O'Hearn, Kane Roberts), thanks to the considerable rock credentials of producer Bob Ezrin.

Despite the seemingly can't-miss nature of the project and a good critical reception, Count Three And Pray was a bitter failure commercially. It seemed that radio was not at all interested in the much louder and more strident sounds of the band's first new music in two and a half years. In fact, the album's first single, a galloping slice of upbeat pop called "Like Flames" barely made it to #82 before disappearing in less than a month and no other songs from the project were ever able to reverse the band's suddenly nose-diving momentum. Count Three And Pray itself managed to sleepwalk around the album chart for 3 months, but never cracked the Top 60 while doing so. You have to wonder if Geffen was thinking maybe we should have sicced Moroder on this one, too ...

While Geffen was bitterly disappointed by the public's rejection of Count Three And Pray, the band themselves were devastated. Perhaps unsurprisingly, things fell apart quickly in the early part of 1987, and the band effectively ceased to exist after Terri Nunn departed for the solo career the label figured she was destined for in the wake of "Take My Breath Away." The last official release from Berlin after that was a decent best-of album released for the Christmas 1988 sales rush. End of story.

Crawford and Brill bounced back almost immediately (at least in artistic sense) with their next project, The Big F. Functioning as pure catharsis for Crawford after the flameout of Berlin, The Big F was a blistering alternarock/metal hybrid that was intended as an angry upraised middle finger to the music industry (thus the subtle band name) and received about the level of promotion you would expect for such a project on a major label (a subsequent Big F release on a different label met a similar fate in 1993).

Surprisingly, Nunn's solo career crashed and burned on startup in 1992 when she released The Moment Of Truth. A year later, following the dissolution of The Big F, Crawford and Nunn made an abortive attempt to write music together once again, but Crawford's disillusionment with the music industry at that point ultimately rendered the reunion moot. End of story again.

Ah, but in 1996, Berlin magically reunited as a totally new (and apparently very Goth-friendly) lineup fully under Nunn's control (this followed her acquisition of the Berlin name following some name-ownership dealings with Crawford that left the two at odds for years). A live album of this new lineup featuring a couple of newly-written songs and titled Sacred And Profane tested the commercial waters for this new lineup and apparently found them good (though sales were a fraction of the albums done by the "classic lineup"). In 2002, Voyeur , the first studio album credited to Berlin in sixteen years appeared in record stores. While researching this article, I also became aware during a visit the reconstituted band's website of a brand new Berlin album apparently being released on July 5 -- an all-covers effort, cheekily titled 4play.

Now for that Pink Floyd connection I was talking about ... while producing Count Three And Pray with the band in 1986, Bob Ezrin was also starting work with guitarist David Gilmour on what would become Pink Floyd's first album since the departure of Roger Waters: A Momentary Lapse Of Reason. To keep himself in playing shape over the intervening years since The Final Cut and his About Face album and tour, Gilmour had become an in-demand session player on various albums by artists like Bryan Ferry, Pete Townshend and Arcadia. While most of his guest appearances on these albums are pretty easily recognizable to any Gilmour fan, perhaps his greatest non-Floyd guitar solo appeared on the epic ballad "Pink And Velvet," the final track on Count Three And Pray. Let loose for nearly three minutes over the song's extended outro, Gilmour lays down a breathtaking, fiery solo that at times brings to mind his fretwork on "Comfortably Numb" and on the future Floyd classic "On The Turning Away."

THE DEAD WALK!

Holy fucking shit.

O.K. then, now that Hell has truly frozen over at last, I am going to go to the corner and get a nice, tall, icy soft drink. I will also thank providence (or whomever) that this is happening overseas and not anywhere within 500 miles of where I'm sitting. My bank account is therefore safe.

If these guys announce a tour, however, all is lost.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: The Egg

Long before acts like The New Deal started attracting attention with winding, improvised sets in a style perhaps worst described as "jamtronica," Oxford's The Egg blazed the trail by fusing instrumental virtuosity and cutting edge recording technology through two rich, varied albums and a series of rapturously-received (and highly visual) live performances at sundry U.K. music festivals.

One of the most unique (and sadly overlooked) acts to come out of the England during that high-flying period between the ascent of "BritPop" and the arrival of "Girl Power," The Egg (not to be confused with the early-70s prog-rock outfit which lacked a definite article) was formed in 1994 by twin brothers Matt and Ned Scoff (drums and keyboards, respectively) with bassist Dave Gaydon and guitarist Mark Revell filling out the lineup.

From the start, The Egg sounded like two or three different bands mashed into one as funked-out, itchy guitar licks danced madly around a bouncing, busily chattering rhythm section while beautiful, thick sheets of shiny synths and dreamy piano arpeggios cascaded all around. Perhaps due to their music being almost entirely instrumental in nature (and the band being unafraid to break out the synths when the occasion warranted), it was tempting to think of the The Egg as another would-be player in the exploding electronica scene that was moving forward at flank speed in their home country at the time. While such comparisons almost certainly bought the quartet some added notice when electronica was briefly flirting with mainstream popularity in the U.S., The Egg never truly belonged in the same category as their more explicitly beat-driven "contemporaries."

The first and most immediately noticeable difference between The Egg and, say, The Chemical Brothers, is the music itself, which (in the case of the former) was always actually played in real-time by the band rather than programmed on sequencers, samplers or effects boards. Secondly, the Egg's music was fun to listen to, and nowhere near as arms-length perfect (or predisposed to darkness, for that matter) as most of the electronica crossing the ocean at the time. These factors alone made The Egg's debut release Albumen a complete surprise when it appeared stateside in early 1997.

With the exception of Prodigy'sThe Fat Of The Land and The Chemical Brothers' Dig Your Own Hole, nearly all of the imported electronic music of 1997 that was supposed to break wide open in the U.S. failed to do so. As part of that intended new wave, Albumen went down with the rest of the pack and marked the first and last time The Egg would have an album released in the States. Back home, while the quartet remained a cult-level attraction, their fortunes were beginning to look up by the time their more overtly electronic sounding follow-up (Travelator) album appeared in late 1998. While this second Egg album also failed to dent the U.K. charts, the single "Getting Away With It" managed to make an appearance on the U.K. Top 75 singles list and, if nothing else, gave them a signature song to close out their sets with.

Of course, it was from this very promising stepping stone in their career that The Egg stumbled. Doh! At least in this case, though, the blame does not lie with the band but with their label, which fell victim to that New Era bugaboo called "corporate reorganization." Set carelessly adrift just as they looked ready to make a decent commercial impression at last, The Egg seemed to just vanish into thin air.

Happily, the story does not end there: while researching this post, I discovered to my surprise that the band did not break up at all, but continued recording and performing and released their third full-length album late last year. Titled Forwards, it appears from all accounts that The Egg are still successfully persuing the same dizzying multi-genre approach they have been over the last decade, though with a more chilled-out feel to some of the tracks (many seem to bring up the work of fab French duo Air in comparison).

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Submarine

It's not often that you come across a would-be pop star who went all the way through med school before giving stardom a whirl. A pragmatic sort of gent, Submarine's founder and keyboardist Al Boyd at least made sure that he would have a rewarding career as a doctor in London to fall back on in case his musical aspirations failed to take the world by storm. Teamed with percussionist/lyricist Richard Jeffrey and Nigerian-bred singer Adaesi Ukairo, Submarine released their one and only record, the self-produced sampladelic gadget fest SkinDiving, in the fall of 2000.

Despite the Boyd's thickly layered production, a melodic and accessible batch of songs, and a range of samples giving inspirational props to everyone from Chet Baker and Billie Holiday to Perry Como, the arrival of Submarine on U.S. shores couldn't have come at a worse time. Attempting to play catch-up with far too many similarly-styled trip-hop duos and trios that had arisen and disappeared in recent years (such as Mono, Baxter, Olive, Morcheeba, and Lamb) put the trio at an immediate disadvantage from which they were never able to recover. Thus, the only sizable splash Submarine were able to make was on the Billboard Dance Music charts, where their uptempo single "Sunbeam" managed to scrape the Top 15.

There was another song on the SkinDiving, however, that I feel deserves special mention on its own, and that is the yearning, loping reverie "Evergreen." Thick with the kind of squelching, slightly off-kilter synth tones that bring to mind the antics of cartoony fellow countrymen Moloko, "Evergreen" is a perfect blend of Ukairo's aching, emotive vocals and Boyd's detailed electronics. With a bit of tweaking for length and perhaps some additional sugar coating via. remix, "Evergreen" just might have given Submarine the hit they needed to stay afloat (sorry) for at least one more album.