SOUNDTRACK: TEENAGE FANCLUB-Shadows (2010).
Back in the 90s, Teenage Fanclub released a few noisy, feedbacky records that were quintessential 90s alt rock.
Since then they have mellowed considerably, and this album is one of their most mellow to date. Usually for me this kind of mellowing is a sign that I’m done with a band; however, Teenage Fanclub’s songwriting gets better with every disc. And these folky tracks are all fantastic.
What’s neat about the arrangement of the album is that each of the three members of the band writes four songs. They are collated so that you cycle through each singer before repeating. You get maximum diversity–and it’s easy to tell which songwriter is your favorite.
The opening two songs, “Sometimes I Don’t Need to Believe in Anything” and “Baby Lee” are two wonderful upbeat pop confections. They sound very different and yet both are infused with wonderful pop chops.
It seems that Blake is my favorite songwriter on this disc. He did “Baby Lee”, “Dark Clouds” (a pretty piano based number) and by far the prettiest song on the disc “When I Still Have Thee.” It’s an amazingly catchy folk song that sounds timeless (and even has the great couplet: “The Rolling Stones wrote a song for me/It’s a minor song in a major key.”
That’s not to dismiss the other songwriters at all. In fact, hearing their different takes on pop music is really pretty amazing. It’s a shame that it takes them so long to put albums out (about 5 years these days).
[READ: June 10, 2011] Five Dials Number 9
Five Dials Number 8, The Paris Issue, was pretty big (45 pages), but it had a lot of pictures. Five Dials Number 9 is also pretty big (41 pages) and it’s (almost) all text. For this is the Fiction Issue, and there are a lot of short stories in here.
CRAIG TAYLOR-A Letter from the Editor: On ‘Summer Reading’ and Fiction Issues.
Since most of what I talk about in the introduction to these posts is covered in Taylor’s Letter from the Editor, I figured I’d switch formats and start talking about his letter right away. In this letter, Taylor talks about the serious pitfalls of ‘Summer Reading’: We pledge to read mammoth books over the summer, but really we never finish War and Peace over the summer, do we? (except those of us who finished Infinite Summer, am I right?). And so, this Fiction Issue was released in December (finally, a date is given to a Five Dials!). Taylor briefly talks about all of the authors who contributed (including a pat on the back to Five Dials for securing the rights to a Philip Roth contribution in its first year of publication). He also talks about the essay from David Shields that is decidedly anti-fiction. And the final note is that Taylor’s own father has a piece in this issue (nepotism is alive and well!) (more…)
This is a periodical I haven’t mentioned before. Wholphin is a “DVD Magazine of Rare and Unseen Short Films.” So yes, the reason I hadn’t mentioned it is because it is a DVD and not a book. However, as I have been watching Vols 1-8 over the last few months, I have noticed that a few writerly names keep cropping up in the credits. Plus, it’s got that whole McSweeney’s connection.
film possibly ever by Scott Prendergast called “The Delicious” which you can watch, and I encourage you to, 
I Just Read About That... 