1. Synecdoche, NY2. There Will Be Blood
3. The Royal Tenenbaums
4. Amelie
5. Adaptation
6. I'm Not There
7. Match Point
8. Minority Report
9. About Schmidt
10. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Monday, January 4, 2010
Friday, January 1, 2010
Car Car's Top Ten Movies of the Year!*
1. The Messenger
2. Fantastic Mr. Fox
3. A Serious Man
4. UP
5. Where the Wild Things Are
6. 500 Days of Summer
7. Antichrist
8. District 9
9. Up in the Air
10. Star Trek
*Carmen didn't see The Hurt Locker :'(
Friday, December 4, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Top Ten Songs of the Naughties #'s 2-4
#2 Staralfur by Sigur Ros
Few bands can offer up a purely subjective experience with their songs. To individuate modern music means to transcend genre and lyrics and in doing so elicit a reaction in the listener that is as abstractly unknowable as it is instinctively known, a comprehending on the far side of your gut. Sigur Ros produces just that. Each of their teeny-weeny symphonies presents a song that builds like every indescribable moment in your life plucked out of chronology and jammed into sequential order, with respect to dynamics. Whether their songs are woeful or jubilant, demolishing or inspiring is entirely up to the listener. Every song means everything and every song means nothing, but, regardless of what each song means, the overarching message of the band is nothing but celebratory, revelatory, brilliant. IT'S LIKE LIFE OR SOMETHING.#3 Brother Sport by Animal Collective
Nowadays, originality is rare. Nowadays, what people deem original is thievery billed under a different name and shown in the right lighting. Yet, Animal Collective is wholly, confoundingly original. Few songs are composed of intergalactic jungle beats backing a heartsick boy's choir with lyrics like monolith haiku, plus man-child howls. What arises is as phantasmagoric as it is simple, as accessible as it is obtuse. By the song's mantric outro, the listener is so awash with disorientation and physical/mental overload that the disparate emotions begin to bind and converge and by the time the song fades out you're at a point of complete cohesion because originality demands nothing less.
Everyone you know has no idea. Everyone you know sells themselves short. Everyone you know is floating in space. Everyone you know can cry from happiness. Everyone you know someday will die. Everyone you know will say goodbye. Everyone you know will let life pass them by. Everyone you know will let everything good go to waste. Everyone you know will see only darkness in night and you have to realize that night is just day without light.
Nowadays, originality is rare. Nowadays, what people deem original is thievery billed under a different name and shown in the right lighting. Yet, Animal Collective is wholly, confoundingly original. Few songs are composed of intergalactic jungle beats backing a heartsick boy's choir with lyrics like monolith haiku, plus man-child howls. What arises is as phantasmagoric as it is simple, as accessible as it is obtuse. By the song's mantric outro, the listener is so awash with disorientation and physical/mental overload that the disparate emotions begin to bind and converge and by the time the song fades out you're at a point of complete cohesion because originality demands nothing less.#4 Do You Realize? By The Flaming Lips
Everyone you know has no idea. Everyone you know sells themselves short. Everyone you know is floating in space. Everyone you know can cry from happiness. Everyone you know someday will die. Everyone you know will say goodbye. Everyone you know will let life pass them by. Everyone you know will let everything good go to waste. Everyone you know will see only darkness in night and you have to realize that night is just day without light.Friday, September 25, 2009
Top Ten Songs of the Naughties #'s 5-7
#5 Steam Engine by My Morning Jacket
Permanence. As much as this song is a celebration of the band's lustrous oceans of sound and Jim James' battered, towering vocals and humming twilight rays of slide guitar, it is about permanence. It is about recognizing the toxicity and transience in all the things we ascribe meaning and substance to. It is about how these things mean nothing. It is about how the awfulness that falls through a person exists wholly, is inherently designed, to end. And how the irrevocable instances of our lives, the ability for songs to sink through our skin and set our blood alight, everything that matters, really truly you-know-it matters, that those things know no end. They go on and on and on and on, like a steam engine. Get it?
#6 Heartbeats by The Knife
Heartbeats is a love song, through and through. In most cases this would entail a harkening to better days passed, or a lamenting of futures unrealized, perceptions betrayed, emotions unreciprocated, but this song is none of these things. This song is a refutation of these things. Through the unrelenting backbeat, the ever-ascending synths, the exalted siren vocals, The Knife construct a love affair that exists outside of the aforementioned. In this song, love isn't a sum of moments, or an escape to another place, it exists entirely in the moment, in a moment of pure reciprocation, of two heartbeats fighting for synchronicity, of silent minds and furious bodies, a moment of two people actually loving each other enough to fold solely into that pocket of time together and to live so much within that moment that nothing exists beyond it and nothing can make it end. It is great.
This song is pure audio sublimity. This is the hypnotic lullaby that plays in your most immersive dreams to loft you back to reality. It gets to a point that the lyrics' importance is almost entirely negated. Eloquence aside, who gives a flippity frak what this song is about. For Car Car, it's about the 2007 Hillary Swank movie, The Reckoning. Hillary Swank is the Reckoner, because she's real gross, but she can act. Which is something to reckon, he supposes. To CP, certain things aren't meant to be intellectualized, because it undermines their ineffability or something or the other or the what-have-you. This is certainly one such case.
Heartbeats is a love song, through and through. In most cases this would entail a harkening to better days passed, or a lamenting of futures unrealized, perceptions betrayed, emotions unreciprocated, but this song is none of these things. This song is a refutation of these things. Through the unrelenting backbeat, the ever-ascending synths, the exalted siren vocals, The Knife construct a love affair that exists outside of the aforementioned. In this song, love isn't a sum of moments, or an escape to another place, it exists entirely in the moment, in a moment of pure reciprocation, of two heartbeats fighting for synchronicity, of silent minds and furious bodies, a moment of two people actually loving each other enough to fold solely into that pocket of time together and to live so much within that moment that nothing exists beyond it and nothing can make it end. It is great.#7 Reckoner by Radiohead
This song is pure audio sublimity. This is the hypnotic lullaby that plays in your most immersive dreams to loft you back to reality. It gets to a point that the lyrics' importance is almost entirely negated. Eloquence aside, who gives a flippity frak what this song is about. For Car Car, it's about the 2007 Hillary Swank movie, The Reckoning. Hillary Swank is the Reckoner, because she's real gross, but she can act. Which is something to reckon, he supposes. To CP, certain things aren't meant to be intellectualized, because it undermines their ineffability or something or the other or the what-have-you. This is certainly one such case.Thursday, September 17, 2009
Top Ten Songs of the Naughties #'s 8-10
#8 Wake Up by Arcade Fire
After its marching, choral buoyed intro, Win Butler sings that "Something filled up his heart with nothing." What he refers to is unidentifiable, something symptomatic of the times but entirely free of condemnation. Well, in part, it's about full-growed adults acting like blubbering babies and how this poisons everything and how people should slaughter the charade of preservation and politeness and say what they fucking feel for once, but there's other things there, too! The song is not about placing blame, but recognizing the ways things is. In the first verse, "Wake Up" brings examination from Win's perspective, segueing into the second verses almost didactic collective "you" POV, and by the time these perspectives converge on the dementedly incredible lyric of "We're just a million little gods causing rainstorms, turning every good thing to rust," you can't tell if that just is meant to signify limitation, or if you're meant to hang on that just, because to be flawed and childish is to be a human being, and that's something outside justification.#9 Good Girl/Carrots by Panda Bear
For not-brief stretch of Best Summer Ever 09, Carmen was convinced that this song was the sonic approximation of his soul. With its hybrid structure, engrossingly enveloping ethereality, and lyrics that are at turns incomprehensible and poignant, the song never strives to be understood, only enjoyed. It presents itself as convoluted cochlear assault for headphonaphiles, but at its core, it's a song about simplicity hidden within the folds of words and relationships and Mitch Hedberg's death and negativity and lameness. At the climax of "Carrots," a section that tiptoes into the outer ear, plays like harps on your wedding day played with the feathers of some great prehistoric birds, Panda Bear joyfully chucks artifice into the bleachers, with audacious abandon, and identifies more than presents the ways things is, crooning:
In the wake of releasing arguably the most influential album of all time, Radiohead toured and toured and abated the world's rabid anticipation to OK Computer's follow-up, finally delivering Kid A, an abstract monolith of blips and reverb mountains and modulation and pure, unfiltered genius. EIIRP's opening mellotron chords play like an exhalation of Sisyphean relief, a thousand sonic breezes blanketing a body fevered by expectation and unwarranted distress. It plays like the funeral song for what rock bands were capable of, up until that point, set to diminished ivory tickles and Thom Yorke's interstellar echolalia. If anything the song is an assurance, a reiteration that life will provide you neither what you expect or entirely desire, how things are the way they are because they have to be, not because they choose to be, and how that isn't necessarily that awful.
For not-brief stretch of Best Summer Ever 09, Carmen was convinced that this song was the sonic approximation of his soul. With its hybrid structure, engrossingly enveloping ethereality, and lyrics that are at turns incomprehensible and poignant, the song never strives to be understood, only enjoyed. It presents itself as convoluted cochlear assault for headphonaphiles, but at its core, it's a song about simplicity hidden within the folds of words and relationships and Mitch Hedberg's death and negativity and lameness. At the climax of "Carrots," a section that tiptoes into the outer ear, plays like harps on your wedding day played with the feathers of some great prehistoric birds, Panda Bear joyfully chucks artifice into the bleachers, with audacious abandon, and identifies more than presents the ways things is, crooning:Get your head out of those mags,
and websites that try to shape your style.
Take a risk just for yourself,
and wade into the deep end of the ocean.
#10 Everything in Its Right Place by Radiohead
In the wake of releasing arguably the most influential album of all time, Radiohead toured and toured and abated the world's rabid anticipation to OK Computer's follow-up, finally delivering Kid A, an abstract monolith of blips and reverb mountains and modulation and pure, unfiltered genius. EIIRP's opening mellotron chords play like an exhalation of Sisyphean relief, a thousand sonic breezes blanketing a body fevered by expectation and unwarranted distress. It plays like the funeral song for what rock bands were capable of, up until that point, set to diminished ivory tickles and Thom Yorke's interstellar echolalia. If anything the song is an assurance, a reiteration that life will provide you neither what you expect or entirely desire, how things are the way they are because they have to be, not because they choose to be, and how that isn't necessarily that awful. Wednesday, September 16, 2009
power music, electric revival
Back from his three-month sabbatical of lechery and bacchanalia, Car Car has returned to the blogosphere entirely self-actualized and sporting a tan life-shattering in uniformity and shade alike. To ease back into the swing of things, and in honor of Pitchfork Media's 500 Best Songs of the 00's, CP has organized his list of Top 25 Songs of the Naughties, the first fifteen of which will be catalogued right here after this sentence ends.Car Car's Top 25 Songs of the Naughties #'s 25-11
25. My Body is a Cage by Arcade Fire
24. Ashes of American Flags by Wilco
23. Staring at the Sun by TV on the Radio
22. 3 Peat by Lil' Wayne
21. Boys You Won't by The Wrens
20. Lateralus by Tool
19. Mykonos by Fleet Foxes
18. Inni mer syngur vitleysingur by Sigur Ros
17. There There (The Boney King of Nowhere) by Radiohead
16. Bros by Panda Bear
15. Street Lights by Kanye West
14. Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) by Arcade Fire
13. The Whale Song by Modest Mouse
12. Roulette Dares (The Haunt Of) by The Mars Volta
11. Two by The Antlers
The forthcoming Top Ten Songs will be accompanied by illuminating and confounding justifications a la CP's Top Ten Album's of All Time List, but until then here's a look into what's to come, in the future.
COMING SOON
What's Better? The Pixar Edition: (Wall-E or UP!)?
The Ecstasy of the Small Fan
Thus Far: CP's Favorites of Everything of 2009
Which Actor Most Resembles Car Car (or the other way around?)
Most Anticipated Movies of the Fall
Is It Still Permissible to Like Batman?
The Taxi-Cab Hat
Sneak Peaks of Original Works by CP including and not limited to:
In the End, Everyone Dies
Coming Together
Resort!
and...
GET GROWNED UP!
A 500-Part Series in Which Car-Car Unlocks and Dismantles Life's Great Mysteries
What Happens After Death?
Living the Just Life
Adulthood
The Persistence of Memory
Time as Phenomena, Entity, and Whatchamacallit
Religion
Art, Defined
The Untethered Embrace of the Unknown
Belly Sadness
and
808's and Heartbreak: Masterpiece or Brick of Shit?
Here's Hope Everyone had the Best Summer Ever!!!
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