Nick Cave’s latest album Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is new to me in 2009, so I feel more or less justified in reviewing it here, given the precedent set by Zach’s very cool “new to me” Animal Collective review from a couple of weeks back.  And with an artist like Cave, it’s almost impossible to keep on top of his prodigious output anyway, particularly over the last few years.  Cave has been on an extended hot streak over the last decade, which really kicked off with 1996’s surprise hit Murder Ballads, and has extended through a number of studio and lives albums, from 1997’s plaintive The Boatman’s Call to 2007’s roaring, raunchy Grinderman project.  Aside from the ridiculous number of albums he’s released since the mid-nineties, Cave has also scored a couple of movies and written a novel and a screenplay…and probably built a house himself and penned a treatise or two.  What’s the man’s secret?  Aside from possibly hopping into bed with the devil as a child, apparently it has to do with having given up heroin and sticking to a religious routine of spending 9-5 every weekday in a cramped London office writing songs at a piano.  Not the most predictable way for indie rock’s dark prince to spend his time, but it does result in some great music.

No sample songs to share, but if someone walks me through uploading them in the comments, I’ll add a couple of my favorites.  The rest of the review is below the cut.

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Feel I should just point out that I thought magic the gathering night was pretty much a complete success. More than I let on. It even caused me some concern. After doing some reading. I feel that if I were to start building decks, there’d be a weird gap in knowledge and cards because everybody has established their collection with much earlier releases. I hear that for example lightning bolt is considered too powerful in hindsight.

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You might be familiar with this already. But I was just playing cave story this morning. I recommend it for anybody who liked the nyfllas games. It seems to be a more traditional type of action but it’s still pretty good. Not sure if it gets hard. But the second stage has the best music.

Sorry for the downtime last night. I had to do some needed upgrading and maintenance here. Wordpress updates pretty frequently for my taste. The latest upgrade adds a lot of changes to the administration side of things. So, dont be surprised if things look changed. Had to deactivate some plugins during the install.

So I thought that since a large chunk of the country – and the world – has been transfixed by today’s presidential inauguration, it might be a good idea to ask how transformative you think Barack Obama is going to be as president. There’s obviously a great deal of hyperbole surrounding Obama – some of the commemorative supermarket magazines that celebrate him as “America’s Hope” strike me as a somewhat creepy form of hagiography. Regardless, I think it’s fair to at least consider the possibility that Obama’s rise to the presidency marks some sort of definitive shift in American politics, and perhaps American life.

So what do you all think?

Is Obama going to govern in a way that is markedly different from past administrations, or at least from George W. Bush? Is the fact that the U.S. elected a young, conciliatory, biracial (and African American-identified) man as president going to translate to real benefits for our reputation abroad beyond a kind of symbolic gain? Is he up to what The Onion memorably called the nation’s “worst job”? (as in, “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job”) How long will the Obama honeymoon last in Washington, and are we all going to wake up in a couple of years to Obama involved in petty squabbles with Congress, having perhaps overstepped executive privilege or gotten mired in an embarrassing scandal, and wonder why we thought he’d be so different?

I’ve supported and been enthusiastic about Obama since the primaries. I’m also a confirmed liberal, and am besides somewhat susceptible to the narrative of progressive American recommitment to the democratic model – so I’m in that sense inclined toward interpreting this as a paradigm shift. But I also profoundly resented W.’s framing of 9/11 as a “game-changing” moment in American history, which allowed (in my opinion) for a whole series of abuses. As much as many are inclined to idolize Obama and get wrapped up in his vision of a fundamentally changed political landscape, in my view it’s naive to think that Obama can’t let us down, either through mediocrity or through resemblance – in some respects at least – to George W. Bush.

Like I said in my best of 08 post, Bibio’s Hand Cranked (released in 06 but new to me in 08) is pretty much the best thing ever. Kind of picking up where Fi left off in terms of making this totally natural and rich hybrid of the traditional and the electronic. But whereas I often find myself drifting when listening to Fi, almost just enduring some songs to get to the real standouts, Hand Cranked is solid gold all the way through. Maybe it’s just because it hit me at exactly the right time, but at the moment I would easily, easily put this into the pantheon of top 10 albums all-time.

Kind of unusual to get so excited about something for me, I think. Like most of us, probably, when confronted with something we really enjoy on a totally sincere level the first reaction is to question our own reactions. Clearly we’ve missed something, didn’t get some big joke. Have to find some flaw to hang the ironic hat on, or else it’s not okay to like it. Something like that, anyway. But in the case of Hand Cranked I think it’s just really actually amazing, no qualifiers.

The song “Zoopraxiphone” is available to listen to on the Mush Records website.

And here’s one of my current favs off the album, “Above the Rooftops”:

I almost forgot to post my thoughts on magic the gathering night. I was looking forward to playing magic the gathering for the first time all week, so much better than watching movies. But, my schedule and everything dictated that I go to bed at 5 friday evening, so I missed most of it. Hindsight it was probably better that I wasnt there for the beginning. I imagine z d and r got to play a few games without my non-magic knowing self sandbagging the endeavor.

But I will say that I was pretty excited about it. I wish there was some way to work on my game in the interim but I don’t have a single card. You can tell that there’s potential for deep strategy.

Last night, not quite able to bring myself to rent the disappointing Pineapple Express and too embarrassed to confront the youngish video store clerk with the new version of Brideshead Revisited (which the literary scholar in me has been frothing at the mouth over for months), I decided to check out the relatively recent Ever Since the World Ended, which presents itself on its DVD case as an account of San Francisco in the near future, after the collapse of human civilization.  This is partially accurate: in reality, ESTWE is a very low budget fake documentary “shot” by one of the survivors of a plague that has reduced the Earth’s human population to a fraction of its former size.  In the world of ESTWE, only about 190 people – who were somehow immune to the plague – survive in San Francisco, where they live off the stockpiles of food and other goods left behind by the dead.  With their material needs mostly met, they struggle with the trauma of what they have witnessed and the loneliness of living in an empty city, as well as with the problem of how to protect themselves against roving dogs (they shoot them) and human undesirables (they expel them or shoot them), and with how to build community in the absence of what they knew to be “civilization.”

So far, this is a pretty standard post-apocalyptic, dystopian story, perhaps on the less violent side as these things go – no punk rock-style street gangs roving the streets shooting guns in the air and threatening people while listening to Motorhead, just a lot of discussion about relearning how to hunt and fish, and on the proper way to store solar panels.  And the human “bad seeds” threatening the community are basically limited to one pyromaniacal former EMT, who is apparently dispatched by some concerned citizen about halfway through the film, and a semi-sleazy dumpster diver who occupies the center of the community’s barter economy and alludes to trading goods for sex. 

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the question on everybody’s mind