Don’t you just love those times a seemingly random trail of decisions leads to your discovering a really good band?

I decided to head to Wikipedia, to see what became of Coalesce. I know they had a reunion about ten years ago, and assumed they vanished again, as quickly as they reemerged.

I was right.

However, while reading that, I clicked onto the page for their vocalist, Sean Ingram. And while there, I read that one of his biggest musical influences was none other than Phil Anselmo (drunken racist who also happens to be one of the greatest frontmen ever. The world isn’t black and white. Well, I guess it is to him…)

The source for that was an interview, from about 2001, with Verbicide Magazine, which may or may not exist these days. I doubt it, if the page was archived. I just can’t bring myself to actually find out. Effort.

And while there, I read that he was at the time listening to:

Radiohead, Higher Burning Fire, Lisa Loeb, Tool, A Perfect Circle, Jimmy Eat World. Also a lot of stuff Ed Rose gives me, but I never get band names on those tapes.

Okay, I’ve heard of most of them. But Higher Burning Fire? New to me. But Ingram is a man of fine taste. So I thought…

I’ll check them out.

And I am doing. They’re great! Pretty delicate American indie for the most part. Softer Weezer, harder American Football. Really nice arrangements. Maybe I wouldn’t have loved them when I was 20, mind, so perhaps finding them now is for the best.

But as I listen to them, seeing on Spotify that they average 40 listeners per month. I get to thinking. When they get their 5 cents a month or whatever, do they notice the royalties? Does it warm their collective heart a bit, thinking that people are still checking them out? Or are they bitter, thinking about how much they gave to their one album, that it should have made them stars, so those tiny cheques hurt, like microscopic daggers plunging into their everlasting souls?

For all I know, they’re all in Coldplay. Or they’re ghostwriting Maroon 5 and Sam Smith. But I don’t think so. I think they’re carpenters, baristi, data scientists and maybe there’s a dead one. And they smile inside when they see someone new has discovered their album, 18 years later. Apart from the dead one.

Wave 1*

Wave goodbye?

At my place we’re having a major restructure. It’s one of those where we’re not only changing what we do, but the number of analysts at my band won’t fit into the number the organisation has decided it will need, by 15.

It’s dragged on for months, a bit like Lost in the sense that the decision makers seem not to know any more than the audience about where the story is going to go. Cue myriad “wave 1” meetings

I was going to Edinburgh on Friday morning, not back until Tuesday; our stuff was all getting moved on Monday. Obviously, I’d have to put all my stuff away so someone (probably also me) could move it to the new office.

Also on Monday, we were going to find out our fates: had we been successful in reapplying for our jobs, or would we be considered “at risk”? As I wouldn’t be in the office on results day, I asked them to email my personal account. I wasn’t about to log into my work emails while on holiday.

With that Damoclean sword dangling precariously over my noggin, there was a chilling finality as I cleared my desk. I knew I would be back, at least in the short term, but the sense of departure was in the air.

As it was, I was “successful”. To what end, I don’t know. I received a letter of congratulation, but unlike the usual missives of that type, there was no accompanying promotion or new role. “You will receive information of your new assignment in the new year”, it proclaimed. Forgive me if I don’t hold my breath. All I really know is this: I don’t get the payout, but I do have something in the way of security.

We’ll see if this was a positive result in the fullness of time.

* There will be three waves in all, in which the organisation expects to lose ~500 people.

_iris

Just a quick note to say I am enjoying – if “enjoy” is an appropriate word – the Altars of Grief album, Iris. Google, and the band itself, describes its music as blackened doom! I get the doom, but not the blackened aspect. There are fast drums, but not really monotonous blastbeats. The prevailing mood, I would say, is one of mournful doom.

Mournful doom! There’s a category for the Grammies, hey. Your music in this subgenre would be slow, heavy, but most of all very sad. But mournful more than merely sad. It’s like the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in “the Weeping Song”:

Father, why are all the children weeping?
They are merely crying son
O, are they merely crying, father?
Yes, true weeping is yet to come

I would imagine that such a style of music is not everyone’s cup of tea. However, while walking in the Pennines yesterday in the gloaming, fingers freezing as a heavy fog descended, I found there are few more appropriate soundtracks to such a walk.

The guitars are heavy and melodic, and the vocals a mix of deathy bellows and very heroic melodic fare. It’s not the kind of thing you’d listen to every day, unless you were of a very robust constitution, but it’s edifying once in a while.

Love, by Gaspar Noé

_love-gaspar-noeI wasn’t sure Noe was going to make another film. He shot to prominence with Irreversible, a shattering backwards narrative that forced the audience to confront the grim reality of brutal vengeance before knowing what had led the protagonist to that point, while a woozy disembodied camera floated us uncertainly through Paris from scene to scene, back in time.

Emboldened, and fattened with the gold of investment, Noe made his epic: Enter the Void. It cost a few million, and it made rather fewer million. A four hour journey into the life and afterlife of a lost soul in the seedier areas of Tokyo. It was a bad trip for people afraid of actually having a bad trip. We went backwards again, but also forwards, and into fantasy worlds, memories, nightmares and the nightmare that reality is when one can view events without being able to have an effect on them. A financial sinkhole, it apparently led to Noé vanishing for a number of years.

Love was his reemergence. I tried not to approach it as though it was merely his version of Lars Von Trier’s pretty much contemporary Nymphomaniac Parts I and II, even though that similarly represented a grim, grizzly, melancholic artist deciding to try sex in as much detail as he could get away with.

Where Nymphomaniac features self aware characters cod-philosophising while flashing back to every sexual conquest and humiliation the 4-6 hour running time will allow, Love is ignorant, hypocritical – but human – characters bumbling and fucking their way through life, making and breaking promises for every cum shot in the film. And there are a fair few.

Maybe this was a palette cleanser after Void cleaned out the coffers; a way for Gaspar to show that he can still actually make films. In my head, he had a lengthy series of dark nights of the soul after his big project made back about a tenth of its cost. Though I admired it greatly, it must have stung, not only in terms of finding financiers, but because he must have been expecting great things from what was in a funny way a masterpiece of cinematic vision, simulating hallucinogens through a purely visual and sonic medium, melding the visual and sonic so well (it does have pretty much the greatest opening credits sequence ever, thanks in no small part to the late, great Loiner Mark “LFO” Bell), and meditating very effectively on the nature of mortality and what the physical plane represents.

Love, despite its characters’ protestations, is not so high-minded. You’ve once again got the non-linear narrative, questions answered through flashback and fantasy. But our lead man Murphy (Karl Glusman) is a would-be film maker, who wants to make films about the sentiment of sex, and wants to call any kid he plans to have Gaspar. He realises eventually that he’s not such a great artist.

He’s married and has a kid and isn’t life such a drag, because he’s imprisoned, and it’s not so long ago that he was being sexy and sensual and free with Electra (Aomi Muyock). Electra was also an artist, but the crux of the tale is that her mum has left a message saying she’s not seen Electra in a couple of months. Electra had been having suicidal thoughts. Cue guilt-driven flashback as Murphy tries to piece together where it all went wrong.

Where it all went wrong for him, of course! Forget the poor girl who might be dead. He wants nookie! I don’t know the director’s intention around whether he wanted Murphy to appear sympathetic, but he’s not. He’s flawed and stupid, which I guess makes him a person. He likes sharing fantasies with Electra, as long as they’re fantasies that he enjoys and don’t gross him out or make him jealous. He may have sex with other women, but heaven forbid Electra carries on in a similar manner.

Electra even has a relationship with a fellow called Noe (I’m sure there is some subtext about how Murphy’s toddler son Gaspar is the embodiment of innocence in this particular world, whereas Noe is the worldly-wise businessman who does what he wants, and maybe that’s what I want to say by making this film. I want to recapture the real me. The kid who wants to create rather than the gross, old businessman I have become. But people will only pick on such nuance if I name two characters after myself), which leads to jealous Murphy bottling him, getting arrested and telling the interviewing officer how much he can’t stand France. Maybe that’s a microcosm of current US politics abroad.

I won’t tell you whether Electra is dead or not, but for a sentimental, sexual film it is pretty bleak. Not quite as cold and grim as Nymphomaniac at least, and while I’m not really one for watching people have sex, such scenes are generally very well communicated, both visually and sonically. The soundtrack is fucking brilliant (and long term Noé fans will recognise a few pieces), and the use of colour is pretty staggering at times. But it can all too often seem like Tumblr porn made for the big screen; one of those early Weeknd songs from when he was good, stretched out to two hours. An American Apparel advert without the apparel. And we get a return of the penis cam from Enter The Void – joy.

So it’s good but not amazing. It’s a strangely touching (hush you) look at mortality, how time – and place – pass you by, and asks questions about what we mean by love. Or by promises, for that matter. Maybe it’s a classic, and I’m just envious because I didn’t live like that in my 20s. I just hope that Gaspar and Lars have now got this out of their system, and they have had their fill of cocks and jizz. When you find yourself longing for Antichrist and Irreversible, you know something is wrong…