(from Blog Critics)
Hot Rod Circuit Sorry About Tomorrow/Vagrant
Part of what is so cool about music is that it evokes place so well. Listen. Go put on a Springsteen or U2 disc; where are you? A stadium, packed shoulder to shoulder in a kind of Leni Riefenstahl collective human mass. Put on Bach’s Suites for Solo Cello and suddenly you’re in a church.
My weakness is for the kind of music that makes you feel like you’re leaning against the cigarette-grimed wall of a small club, a bottle of cold beer in your hand, as you shout to try and talk to the person next to you. There are a lot of subclasses here…you may be dodging chairs thrown from the mosh pit, or listening to synthesizers while watching clips from 50’s TV projected on the wall, or actually dancing, as opposed to bobbing up and down in place, to a hard-edged update of Bob Wills…but the sweet spot is a band with 2 guitars, bass, and drums. The singer is a tortured intellectual with a reedy, slightly sharp voice who sings smart-sounding lyrics, and the guitars phase back and forth between a buzz of noise and melody.
Some of my favorite bands sound sort of like that; Jesus and Mary Chain, The Pursuit of Happiness, Thirteen Engines, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and now Hot Rod Circuit.
So call me a sucker for this style. Put the disc in and go open a Bud. You’ll be transported back to every little rock club you’ve ever been to; feel all the edgy insecurity you felt being there, as well as that adolescent hunger for something more than sex that brought you there in the first place.
BOOK REVIEW
(also, surprisingly enough, from Blog Critics)
‘A Brief History of the Flood’ by Jean Harfenist
…disclaimer; I know the author. But I know several other authors with books out and you don’t see me talking about them…
I’m a city boy, raised under the brilliant glow of success and possibility which I saw everywhere around me. This is a novel about someone who grew up in a place where possibility was barely a faint glimmer on the horizon.
It’s a novel – there is a character, Lillian Anderson, who undergoes trial and changes as we watch. But it’s written as a linked set of short stories (think Susan Minot) and so is episodic. Each of the stories closes you in more and more tightly, and in each one you see Lillian struggling harder and harder to get out. Unlike Ray Carver, who similarly wrote about isolated people on questionable roads, the love and respect the author has for these real characters comes through. But not at the expense of an acid point of view: “My sister is the kind of girl who thinks letting Buddy Franklin fuck her in the Hoffmans’ hayloft is the same thing as a date”
It’s a modern Huckleberry Finn, with the modern demons…family rage, the limits of class…replacing the more-concrete demons…bandits, slave-catchers…that Huck and Jim faced together. But both the characters – Huck and Lillian – share a saucy grit that pulls you toward them, and makes you know that wherever they are today, their demons are at least a little bit behind them. And because of that, the book matters.