Ryan Adams has not frustrated me yet

The good news: Hey, Ryan Adams has a new album coming out! The bad news: It's a "metal" record! So you know it's going to be great, right?! Actually, based on the song that popped up on Pitchfork today, the forthcoming ORION sounds more like Trans-era Neil Young than Iron Maiden. I'm not sure this is a good thing, but I'll probably be conned into buying the vinyl when it comes out.

Titus Andronicus, "The Monitor"

In the last few years, my music taste has taken a decided turn toward full-blown 30something white-dudeism. Basically, I’ve been listening mostly (as in 65 percent of the time) to singer-songwriters and bands rooted in the traditions of folk, country, blues, R&B, and early rock ‘n’ roll. In a musical sense, I’ve taken to wearing those jackets with the patches on the elbows. So I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the fact that, in the one-zero, I’ve been falling hard for scrappy, sloppy guitar bands again. (You know, the soundtrack of full-blown 20something white-dudeism.) Call it a one-third life crisis, or perhaps just a shift in what’s interesting for followers of 21^st century folk music made by electrified stringed instruments. But things are finally rocking again on my record player.

Along with Harlem and my beloved Soft Pack, one of my favorite albums of the new year is The Monitor by New Jersey’s Titus Andronicus. My AVC colleague Erik Adams did a fine job summing up the record here—I’ll sign off on everything he says, including the grade, though I might have edged it up to an A- because I’m a sucker for art with eyes too big for its stomach. The Monitor has flaws aplenty, chief of which are 1) every song going on and on for eight minutes, which, c’mon, is too damn long and 2) Patrick Stickles’ histrionic, Peter Brady-esque off-key vocals. Oh, and it’s also about the Civil War or some bullshit. (On the scale of Ken Burns’ documentary subjects, only the history of American national parks is a less fitting concept for a rock record.)

But even if it’s unwieldy and difficult to digest, The Monitor is often genuinely thrilling, thoroughly sweeping, and legitimately epic, treating the blood-soaked battlefields of Lincoln’s time with the crumbling empire of Obama’s as parallel realities occurring simulataneously in the present. It’s also possible that the songs are just about getting fucked up every night in Jersey. (It’s hard to get through all of The Monitor in one sitting, which jumbles the plot a bit.) “The enemy is everywhere,” a chorus sings—or shouts, rather—at one point, and it’s not exactly fearful. The enemy might be the only thing left that ties us to the past. Like Julia Roberts, we sleep with it.

Bobby Womack is California Dreamin'

Back in October I wrote a piece for The A.V. Club about the relationship between The Mama And The Papas’ “California Dreamin’” and Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express, which has changed somewhat since the whole “John Phillips is a consensual rapist” kerfluffle. “California Dreamin’” popped up again sans Phillips in Andrea Arnold’s fine 2009 coming-of-age drama Fish Tank, which screens next week at the Milwaukee Film Festival-Winter Edition. Arnold uses an awesome cover version of the song by Bobby Womack, which I’d never heard before but loved pretty much from the opening guitar strum. But Phillips is still creeping around in Fish Tank; to say how would quickly take us into spoiler-riffic territory. So I’ll just post the song and urge you to see the movie

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California Dreamin' - Bobby Wo...

All hail The Wolf King

One of the most played albums at my house over the past several months has been John Phillips’ debauched 1970 solo debut, John Phillips (John, The Wolf King Of L.A.). I bought the album in October at the Amoeba Records on L.A.’s Sunset Strip, not far from where many of the record’s wondrously sad songs about bottomed-out hippies are set. I’ve been fascinated by Phillips for a long time—partly because he was a masterful pop songwriter with a knack for expressing spiritual and emotional crisis in the context of brassy, deathless pop songs, and partly because he was a monumental skeeze who rode the ’60s dream deep into the cold, hard depths of Hell. On John Phillips, he reminds me a little of a west coast Lou Reed, as he wanders in a heroin daze amid beautiful people whose souls are as empty as their drug-addled eyes. There’s also tons of steel guitar throughout, which is like catnip for me.

Holland Tunnel - John Phillips

"Pickup On South Street" (1953)

Amid the orgy of crit-writing that’s accompanied Scorsese’s new love it or hate it “waking nightmare” Shutter Island have been numerous references to another mind-bending nuthouse flick from nearly 50 years ago, Samuel Fuller’s lurid 1963 masterpiece Shock Corridor. I’ve long been a fan of SC and Fuller’s follow-up movie, the even stranger and probably better The Naked Kiss, but somehow I’m just now getting around to checking out other highlights of the cigar-chomping legend’s filmography. A few days ago I watched Pickup On South Street, Fuller’s hard-as-nails noir about Communist paranoia from 1953. It’s straighter than SC and TNK, but still boasts Fuller’s characteristic intensity, dazzling camerawork, and unabashed sleaziness.

My favorite part of the movie is probably the famous opening scene, where Richard Widmark (in a standout, truly assholish performance) oh-so-delicately steals Jean Peters wallet on a crowded subway train … and maybe something even more valuable.

As an extra bonus, check out the opening scene from The Naked Kiss, which is one of the great all-time attention grabbers in cinema history.

How am I not already a fan of Califone?

Don't sleep on opening acts, people. Last night I saw Califone open for Wilco at the Overture Center in Madison, and the skronky Chicago indie-folk band shamed me for my shockingly inadequate knowledge of its music. I plan on rectifying that, starting with last year's All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, which I picked up at the merch table. So far the record seems a touch less dynamic and powerful than Califone's live show, which built from broken-down country blues to blisteringly loud and roaring squalls of sonic riffage with the inevitable crawl of a land-choked mudslide. You can tell as much from the album version of "Funeral Singers," which is quieter here than the thrilling in-concert highlight it was last night. Still, good song.

Funeral Singers - Califone

Malcolm-Jamal Warner's top secret tips for how to be popular

YouTube recommended this for me. I think YouTube knows me better than most of my friends.