Video & Audio: April 2021
Plus: Oscar picks!
Japanese Breakfast: “Be Sweet”
A chorus big enough to fill a Chvrch, but Michelle Zautner has faced darknesses unknown to Scots. She sings “I wanna believe” like she’s just lost her faith.
Lydia Loveless feat. Laura Jane Grace: “September”
Periodically Loveless takes a break from making pretty good heartache-and-alcoholism songs to release a stunning song about how emotional escape from one’s past can never be as complete as physical escape.
The Plastic People of the Universe: “Apokalyptickej Pták” (live 1976)
Six minutes of simple jamming off a simple motif, reset, then a few minutes of more abstract jamming. Plausibly what a slow-moving apocalypse might sound like, if you’re a bird or a feathery dinosaur.
Mickey Guyton: “What Are You Gonna Tell Her?”
This eschews easy answers, instead finding catharsis in the problem statement. That I’d personally incline towards “the truth” as the least difficult answer perhaps suggests it’s for the best that I don’t have kids.
Charlotte Adigéry: “Bear with Me (and I’ll Stand Bare Before You)”
About “being confined thus confronted to the way we live,” in case you thought it was about nudity. Pretty standard ’20s electropop, but Antillean-French-Belgian Adigéry makes the subtitle sound like a threat.
Hamell on Trial: “This Is a Hamell Show”
A technically outstanding piece of comic writing, with layers of self-reference and intricate callbacks to Finland factoids. Also: anal sex: still funny to kids!
Miley Cyrus: “Never Be Me”
The third act twist is worthy in multiple senses of RIP Jim Steinman, but the most formally pleasing fillip is the backing vocal getting one last line into the chorus, making the cliche “I play with fire” feel, among other things, warming.
Sleepy Rose: “Woo”
The first woo-based rap song to have no direct Ric Flair influence, the sound (like the video) is a parody of a parody. Rhymes with “roof” (that’s new), “shoot” (eww), and “broom” too.
Twice: “Cry for Me”
Coloring their usual minor-led chord progressions and intensity variations are the spammed digital kick pops that sound like they’re from bubblebath metal. Metal videos, for their part, should have dance choreography at this level.
Lil B: “Im Kanye”
No you’re not: you’re happy.
***
Oscar picks for the seven categories I’m kind of paying attention to, bearing in mind I haven’t seen Minari yet (nor Chicago 7, Mank, or The Father, but I don’t exactly have high hopes for those)
Best Picture
Will win: Nomadland
Should win: Sound of Metal
As a certified one-time Pazz & Jop voting music critic, I am obliged to remind you that Lovers Rock was the best movie-like thing of 2020, eligibility be darned.
Best Director
Will win: Chloé Zhao, Nomadland
Should win: Chloé Zhao, Nomadland
Maybe Zhao’s radically getting inside the subjectivity of her characters and maybe she’s pointing the camera at Frances McDormand staring into the distance a lot. Either way, it flows.
Best Actress
Will win: Carey Mulligan, Promising Young Woman
Should win: Carey Mulligan, Promising Young Woman
Such is Mulligan’s power to navigate Emerald Fennell’s ambitious tone shifts that she very nearly manages to hold the movie together from off-screen.
Best Actor
Will win: Chadwick Boseman, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Should win: Riz Ahmed, Sound of Metal
I mean give it to Boseman obviously but recognize Ahmed’s undertapped potential as a romantic lead. Just keep him away from metal.
Best Supporting Actress
Will win: Youn Yuh-jung, Minari
Should win: Maria Bakalova, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
Borat 2 was a You Had One Job film, where the job was to embarrass Giuliani, and Bakalova did that pretty well?
Best Supporting Actor
Will win: Daniel Kaluuya, Judas and the Black Messiah
Should win: Paul Raci, Sound of Metal
Raci has a particularly difficult role bringing out the sympathetic elements of an ideology not entirely straightforward to sympathize with, and managed not to get cancelled for it.
Best Documentary
Will win: My Octopus Teacher
Should win: Time
The documentaries Time and Collective are the best movies nominated for anything this year. Time is somewhat more moving and honest, but Collective got me cheering for the technocratic neoliberals over the cursed Social Democrats, which I have to admit was an amusing trick.