Weekly Roundup - Week 1

NOTE: This was supposed to be a script for a video for my YouTube channel that was supposed to come out on Friday, but combine technology failing me with my complete inability to back any footage up, and unfortunately I have to be content with having this in text form. That will be changing in the coming weeks (hopefully) so stay tuned.

Okay, episode one of weekly web show where I go through the albums and movies I watched during the week, along with singles and trailers every other week. I am going to try and get these out on Fridays from next week onward, but no guarantees. For now, I kept my workload pretty small. Two movies that released on Netflix during the week, and three albums. We’ll start with movies and What Happened To Mr. Cha? which released on New Years Day, stars Cha In-pyo, Cho Dal-hwan and Song Jae-ryong and is Kim Dong-kyu’s directorial debut.

What Happened To Mr. Cha? is a Korean satire about an actor who gets himself in an improbable and awkward situation while on a hike that leads to him being buried under a building after it explodes. It’s as bizarre as it sounds, and I’m not sure it really works. While the movie is somewhat impressive technically, the lighting and use of shadows in certain scenes are pretty fantastic, those are also scenes where the editing feels incredibly overdone, relying more on short snappy takes that create a sense of desperate panic pretty well, but fail to foreground the claustrophobia of the situation he’s got himself into all that effectively.

And while I get this is going for satire, the shouty, consistently obnoxious dialogue rubbed me the wrong way real fast. A shame, because the foundation is certainly there for a decent movie that satirizes celebrity culture, with the film simply being about the extent to which someone might go to preserve and maintain their perfect celebrity image, even if it means compromising everything else. I will stress that that is a compelling topic for a satire that could work if it was handled with at least some sensitivity.

The movie might be constantly a half step away from total ridiculousness at all times (and I get why that is, satire and all that), but the third act tested my patience to the limit. You can make satire while maintaining some subtlety and it tends to be what I prefer. This movie goes for the total opposite hoping its sincerity will keep its head above water, but instead it ends up a movie that devolves into blaring noise the longer I tried to focus on it. It’s frustrating because the film has a strong narrative hook that grabbed me initially, and the few characters in the movie that don’t feel totally disposable are pretty likable, but the movie ultimately ends up a situation where the foundations might be strong, but without enough going on on top of it to keep my attention, it’s not a movie I will be going back to anytime soon. 5/10, only check it out if you’re curious.

Now onto Asphalt Burning starring Anders Baasmo Chri, Katherine Thorborg Johansen and Ida Husøy. It is Hallvard Bræin’s third narrative feature.

Nothing about Asphalt Burning made me want to continue watching, but I soldiered on, nevertheless. After losing his would-be wife moments before they were supposed to get married, Roy is challenged to a race on Europe’s most iconic racetrack, the Nürburgring, in a last-ditch attempt to win her back. The best place to start would probably with how contrived the screenplay feels, the conflict feeling engineered and constructed rather than coming about naturally. When the screenplay isn’t feeling contrived, it meanders with a disgusting grandiloquence that I find detestable. It’s not like the characters are any better, though. Robyn is the key one who sets all of this into motion by letting the bride (Sylvia) know that Roy kissed her, but she remains an enigma throughout the whole movie whose motivations for setting the whole thing off are never properly addressed because that’s how much this movie cares about its characters. The movie also makes a habit of flirting with bisexuality (Robyn and Sylvia’s relationship) without having the balls to address it in an interesting and concrete way, especially as Sylvia ends up in a comfortable and conventional heterosexual relationship by the end anyway.

But perhaps that’s too harsh a criticism to level against a movie as shallow as this one is. I touched upon it before, but there are seriously some points in Asphalt Burning where you could mistake it for a Bollywood production, it’s that ridiculous, overblown and contrived. Add that to the mechanically assembled story and you have a movie that feels more like it was commissioned rather than born out of any kind of artistic ambition. And given that the movie is the third in a series, it makes all too much sense. 

That being said, this is not bottom of the barrel terrible. The racing scenes might not produce any interesting or original action, but at least the editing is intense, and the cinematography dynamic enough to keep it mostly compelling despite feeling void of heart. The movie is more frustrating and miserable than downright awful. Not enough for me to be offended, but still enough for me to look at it with a combination of disinterest and disgust. 4/10, Netflix has much better to offer.

Okay, that’s enough on the movies I saw during the week, now onto albums starting off with the alt rock band The Dirty Nill’s who’s third studio album came out on New Year’s Day and is called Fuck Art.

2021 is a year where I hope to become more acquainted with rock music than ever. It won’t really be saying much given that it’s far from my area of expertise, and with that in mind all my opinions on the genre are probably worth taking with a pinch of salt. That being said, I mostly enjoyed Fuck Art, but only as a pretty decent in one ear out the other experience. It’s a rock album that borrows hard from accessible pop punk with how polished and filmy the vocal production often is and how disposable the lyrics are, but the hooks mostly connect so I’m not complaining that much. In fact, the songwriting almost has a ‘disposable by design’ quality to it that makes for an album that is frequently amusing without being all that funny. Even in context, lines like “let me be your doom boy” test my tolerance for the ridiculous to the extreme. There is still a certain bluntness to the songwriting that makes for some interesting moments like ‘Done With Drugs’ which is a song where Luke Bentham sings about quitting drugs and then proceeds to list off things he wants to do instead that includes origami, jujitsu and walking around Ikea. Certainly amusing, but without any strong punchlines to drive any of the songs home, the entire album feels like a light-hearted exercise of futility, especially when ‘One More And The Bill’ is going to undercut the drama by describing how he wants to drink away all his problems. So much for quitting drugs and moving on with your life, I guess.

It’s a problem that comes up again on ‘To The Guy Who Stole My Bike’ which, beyond insisting that they will settle their dispute when they’re both dead, has nothing dramatic or interesting to say to the thief in question. It’s certainly not resentful but borders on complacency. I don’t think either song is worse than ‘Hello Jealousy’, though, which is a pretty damn entitled track where Bentham meditates on the frustration of always thinking he deserves more than he has despite conceding that he can have all that he both wants and needs in the opening lines, rendering the entire song mindless and pointless. Again, there’s no creative or witty punchline to this.

I suppose you could argue that the year 2020 is supposed to be the punchline to all of this, with this album’s upbeat but frustrated complacency and occasional jealousy acting as a subversion of the misery that filled 2020. And given the band’s Apple Music interview, I think that justification might actually redeem Fuck Art, albeit barely. That and the hooks are consistently pretty strong, especially on the more shimmery pop punk-inspired tracks like ‘Blunt Force Concussion’, the killer guitar solos that rips through ‘Doom Boy’ and ‘To The Guy Who Stole My Bike’, and the solid bass lines on ‘Hang Yer Moon’ and ‘Damage Control’ that do a lot of heavy lifting on those songs. It’s a shame they’re not more developed. It is mostly enough to distract from the questionable vocal mixing, though.

There is enough here that works for me, but Fuck Art still leaves me frustratingly cold and is an album that I can bet will not resonate with people, perhaps not even rock fans, outside of the very transitional time we’re living in. I’m glad that I’m off the mark with my attempts to get into more rock music this year, I just hope that I’ll find better than this down the road. This is a 6/10 and only recommended for rock fans.

Now onto the debut album by hip-hop group Fax Gang that also dropped on New Year’s Day, Aethernet. 

At best, Aethernet is an underwhelming experiment gone wrong. At worst, it’s pretty damn infuriating. It’s a bizarre blend of hyperpop with experimental hip hop, if all you mean by ‘experimental’ is that everything is lathered in distortion and the vocals are overproduced into incomprehensibility. There are hardly any interesting melodies that stick out across the album that don’t just feel like they’re just contributing to the cacophonous soundscape. ‘Goodbye’ is probably the exception where the group probably stumbled upon a decent melody by accident. Other than that, the only melodic flourishes we get are pitched up gurgles on ‘Fallen’ and ‘Shotgun’ and that horrible overpowering synth on the overlong ‘Implosion’. The rest just sinks into the distorted mush. 

There is a part of me that is willing to acknowledge that what I don’t like about Aethernet is more rooted in its style rather than anything that it ‘does wrong’. But even if that might be true, I fail to understand how anyone who isn’t already into this style could use this album as a platform to engage with it on a deeper level.

Also, if anyone cares, the songwriting isn’t that good either. It’s a lot of emo whining dressed up in hyperpop in an attempt to gaslight listeners into thinking there’s any more to it than that. But I guess the fusion does kind of make sense. For an album as manic and frenetic as this is, the lyrics are surprisingly frustrated and tired, with the intentionally discordant production supposed to highlight how much the world is crushing around them in such a way that their voices can’t be heard. It’s a cool concept, but the writing is so flimsy and conventional that it’s not doing much to really sell it. The only song any interest whatsoever here is ‘Shotgun’ which describes a toxic relationship that ends in disaster where the guy shoots his partner after getting drunk on a car ride, and, after the resulting crash, is helped out of his car by a passer-by who he will then proceed to shoot himself in front of. Heavy stuff, as is a lot of the suicidal subtext that looms large over the entire album, but just don’t expect any unique lyrical detail to flesh out the scene outside of the bare essentials.

That’s probably the most frustrating thing about Aethernet: it might be intricately produced, but it does not have the detailed or intricate writing in order to match it. Also, it gave me a headache, so 5/10, not worth your time.

Finally, country star Steve Earle is back with his band The Dukes, the album came out on the fourth of January, it’s called J.T..

It is a little bit out of character for me reviewing what is basically an album full of covers, but I’m wanting to take any excuse to highlight rock-solid country music. There is a lot to unpack with this one, though. Steve Earle & The Dukes rattle through ten songs written by Earle’s late son who died in mid-2020 in what is a fitting tribute, but also one where the songwriting and production can fall into easy-breezy territory super-fast. It’s not an album that I think I will go back to as a whole, but more for the little snippets where the album strikes gold. But when the writing hits, man it hits. ‘I Don’t Care’ might be a painfully disposable opener, but ‘Ain’t Glad I’m Leaving’ tells of the outlaw traveller who loses his girl and empathises with her decision to leave because he’s all too aware that his lifestyle has and will negatively affect the relationship down the road.

The same emotionally intelligent songwriting comes up again on ‘Maria’ where he’s facing a breakup and it’s up to him to remove himself from the situation before things get too heavy even as his feelings still linger. If there’s any thematic arc to this album, that would be it. The album kind of is about finding the emotional strength to do the right thing for however tough it might be. From the aforementioned breakups on ‘Ain’t Glad I’m Leaving’ and ‘Maria’ to the utterly miserable breakup for all the right reasons on ‘Far Away In Another Town’, to the celebration of the memory of a person post breakup on ‘Turn Out My Lights’. You could even include the suicide song ‘Harlem River Blues’ in that narrative too if you wanted. 

In fact, the songs that don’t fit into that narrative might end up the worse ones here. ‘Champagne Corolla’ is just some dumb song about a girl driving a car, but following that with ‘The Saint Of Lost Causes’, which has some pretty cold and unfeeling lyrics about succumbing to the pain in the world that don’t have the personality as other songs on the album, might not have been the best idea, especially as Earle’s croakier vocals can’t quite command the more atmospheric production as well as he thinks. The same problem comes up again against the smoky guitars on ‘Lone Pine Hill’.

Despite all that, it might be the music itself that might be the biggest barrier to me fully embracing this album. The playing might be impeccable, but the music itself feels very comfortable. The organ that soaks its way through on ‘Far Away In Another Town’ is about as musically adventurous as the album gets. ‘Turn Out My Lights’, ‘They Killed John Henry’ and ‘Champagne Corolla’ slip into the background real fast. Combine that with the fact that Earle isn’t great as a singer on the more atmospheric cuts, and you have an album that’s very solid, but never really strikes transcendence. ‘Maria’ might be the only exception to that rule with the wild, galloping bass line and percussion putting that song over the edge. 

Overall, as I said before, this is an album best enjoyed in small doses and not as a whole. Take the good songs and get out. 7/10, definitely check it out, it’s worth it. The album certainly proves that Justin Townes Earle was a great songwriter taken from us too soon.

Okay, that just about does it. Tune in next week, hopefully on Friday for my thoughts on whatever I hear that week, as well as my thoughts on some trailers and singles that have released recently.