Come Dance With Me. Russell Hoban. Bloomsbury.
Words | 01/03/2005 at 20:01:13
Its odd that a tale of late-blooming love should, at times, read like the script to a Channel 4 teen drama. Awkward, soulful conversations about, like, life should cease at the age of 16. In Come Dance With Me, however, Hobans characters speak and behave much like angsty teenagers in paunchy, middle-aged bodies. Youve done all right with what to be and where to be
have you worked out how to be? asks 50-something Christabel, getting as deep as Dawsons Creek on her first date with Elias. Its a strangely flat manner for two people with a supposedly electric, almost supernatural connection to converse in. In fact, there is a kind of hollowness to the characters in Come Dance With Me that recalls Orwells criticism of the marionette-like quality of ordinary fiction. The figures move, the words are mouthed, but their eyes are glassy and, in the right light, you can see the strings.
The plot itself is relatively engaging. Each chapter reads like a diary entry. We learn that Christabel, a rock singer, has had brushes with death since childhood, leaving her somewhat withdrawn and self-contained. Elias is a diabetologist, sensible and respected. They meet at a Royal Academy exhibition and a strange connection draws them together. Hoban neatly builds patterns and layers of coincidence, with phrases and images chiming and echoing back and forth between the entries. His love of ghost stories has clearly influenced the drift of the narrative and the language he employs often has a satisfying ring to it when describing birches in a woodland bog he remarks how thinly they took the light. Conversely, its frustrating how often uses ugly and clumsy phrases that jar with the elegant story hes trying to tell.
However, the most unforgivable aspect of Come Dance With Me is the hackneyed scene-setting surrounding Christabels career as a rock and roll star. Bands have names like Mobile Mortuary, Unholy Din and Sayings of Confucius and write songs about dark-eyed gypsies and Egyptian gods. Its embarrassing stuff and Hoban has taken a misstep in writing about something he clearly doesnt know much about. Crushed velvet trousers and Camden Market joss sticks stink up the plot and once you start laughing its quite difficult to stop.
<b>Appeared in Time Out March 2 - 9 2005</b>
Low - The Great Destroyer. Rough Trade.
Words | 27/02/2005 at 15:49:15
Its the end of the road. Seven albums down the line and Low have ridden their boxcar out from under leaden Midwestern skies to some depot in California. Theyve finally reached the horizon. For The Great Destroyer is an album in which a band confronts the inevitably of endings - of full stops and limits - and in confronting these limits, Low have confounded them. Take When I Go Deaf, in which Alan Sparhawk reflects on the end of his career - And Ill stop writing songs/Stop scratching out lines or in the ruminative Death of a Salesman where, forgetting all his songs, he burns his guitar in a rage. Its an album of fire and brimstone, from the serrated synths underpinning Monkey to the overwhelming instant when the guitars in When I Go Deaf engulf the track completely. Were also served sun-dappled pop the first single California or the jangly Just Stand Back and, of course, theres still the trademark vocal interplay between Sparhawk and Mimi Park, notably on the glorious tape warble treble of Cue the Strings. But its the anger that hits hardest here. The Great Destroyer is some death rattle.
<b>Appeared in the February - March 2005 issue of Plan B Magazine</b>
Superwolf - Bonnie Prince Billy and Matt Sweeney. Domino.
Words | 20/02/2005 at 12:29:37
Eschewing the ornate, almost gothic tendencies of some of his recent releases, Superwolf finds Oldham in righteous Southern rock mode. Co-written with long-time friend and collaborator Matt Sweeney, the record sparkles and chimes with harmonic hallelujahs and electric amens. It shares a certain starkness with 2003s Master & Everyone, but whereas the latter album was almost bent double under the weight of its own melancholia, Superwolf emerges from its battles fierce-eyed and triumphant. The searching opener My Home Is The Sea encapsulates the spirit of the album perfectly, with its absurdisms - I love my tummy/Its round and firm and funny - and its breathless wisdom - I know nothing and Im overjoyed pitched on top of a rolling blues riff. Throughout, Oldham and Sweeney wrestle with the basic contradictions of the human experience. Superwolf is filled all at once with wanderlust and dreams of domestic bliss, the search for spiritual and physical love, the desire for companionship and solitude.
<b>Appeared in the February - March 2005 Issue of Plan B Magazine</b>
