November 22, 2013: Jesse was musing on Twitter about the Fathom Events presentation of Glenn Beck’s The Christmas Sweater, which we’d seen advertised every time we’d been to a movie that month. Sensing a need, he put out a call on Twitter for a similar story he could call his own and ride to seasonal riches. By that evening, he’d received the following list.
Continue reading THE CHRISTMAS _________ GAME
An observation about the SportsAlcohol.com Top Television of 2014 list: only one network comedy made the list. We’re a pretty comedy loving bunch, but I’ll admit to being a little surprised, not because there’s only one network show on our list, but that there are any at all. I like the show on our list a lot, and I can think of other worthy contenders (my darling, my Bob’s Burgers), but network comedy is in fairly dire straits at the moment. NBC’s once hallowed (and then hallowed by comedy nerds, if not general audiences) Thursday night comedy block is no more, and the other broadcast networks seem to have similar trouble developing and keeping interesting comedies. And while the age of the incredible cable drama has provided more quality hour-long television than anybody can reasonably keep up with, the comedy offerings on cable haven’t entirely kept pace (not that you’d know it from the great comedies that made our list). But allow me, for a moment, to join in the growing chorus of people trying to draw your comedy-seeking attention back to Comedy Central. Perhaps you think (like I did!) that Comedy Central had given over to a schedule made up entirely of stand-up specials, MadTV reruns, the occasional new episode of South Park, and waves of Tosh-esque smirky misanthropy. But it turns out that in 2014 the network had maybe its strongest collection of original programming ever. In addition to the vital-as-ever Daily Show and Colbert Report, over the last two or three years Comedy Central has amassed a handful of shows with distinctive, well developed comic personality. Sara makes a great case for Broad City (I haven’t seen it! I’m hoping the first season goes back up on Hulu in advance of the second season’s January 14th premiere). But here’s a quick look at five other terrific shows: Continue reading BEST TV OF 2014: Comedy Central is Living Up to Its Name
Let me begin by saying that I didn’t start out disliking True Detective. For the first couple episodes I found it mysterious and compelling, and obviously I was curious enough about the outcome to finish the whole series. But the longer it sat in my memory, the lower it sank, until the least mention of it in conversation would set me off on a rant about its inescapable overratedness.
Continue reading Best TV of 2014: Alternatives to True Detective
There is a lot of stuff on TV; as diverse as our music and movie and book tastes might be here at SportsAlcohol.com, probably no end-of-year voting offered as many different hours as our collective list of the best TV of 2014. Nearly fifty different shows were mentioned across our ballots, which is something like 500 hours of television, give or take. Yet a clear consensus did emerge, and that was that we pretty much all watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine but don’t quite love it the best. Here, below, is what we do love the best (maybe next year, Samberg).
When Peaky Blinders debuted across the pond, it seemed like it was tailor-made for me—and possibly only me. I can see why other people wouldn’t seek it out the way I did, because they might not share:
So, yeah, I resigned myself to watching the first season of the show—about a gang of toughs trying to seize control of the horse-race betting racket in post-WWI Birmingham—as a solo venture.
Everything changed for the second season. It was available on Netflix almost right away, so it didn’t require as much effort to watch. The show expanded its focus to interest people other than me and only me (and by “expanded its focus,” I mean “added Tom Hardy”). More people were watching Sherlock than ever (at least on my Twitter feed), so they were more used to checking out BBC shows for quality entertainment. And…I’m still the only one I know who watches Peaky Blinders. D’oh!
But someone out there should watch this with me. Here’s why.
Continue reading BEST TV OF 2014: Nobody Will Watch ‘Peaky Blinders’ with Me but Everyone Should
For our coverage of the Best Music of 2014, we…
…crowned St. Vincent’s St. Vincent as the best album of the year, doing a track-by-track analysis of her greatness (and also a quick study of her magnificent hair).
…also celebrated four other albums as the best of the year: Teeth Dreams by The Hold Steady, The Voyager by Jenny Lewis, Complete Surrender by Slow Club, and Lost in the Dream by The War on Drugs.
…called out the best-of-the-best, our very favorite songs from our very favorite albums, including “Blue Moon” by Beck, “Goshen ’97” by Strand of Oaks, “Nothing but Trouble” by Phantogram, “Lazerray” by TV on the Radio, “Seasons (Waiting on You)” by Future Islands, “Your Love Is Killing Me” by Sharon Van Etten, and “Lights Out” by Angel Olsen.
…stumped for our favorite songs that didn’t come from our favorite albums, including “I’m Not Part of Me” by Cloud Nothings, “Bury Our Friends” by Sleater-Kinney, “Water Fountain” by tUnE-yArDs, “Mr. Tembo” by Damon Albarn, “Lariat” by Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, “Bright Eyes” by Allo Darlin’, “Backseat Shake Off” by The Hood Internet, and “Scapegoat” by The Faint.
Is there a Spotify playlist for all this?” you ask. Of course there’s a Spotify playlist.
This week, we’ll be celebrating the best television of the year. But before we do that, let’s talk about The Newsroom. Aaron Sorkin’s anti-celebrated HBO drama ended its abbreviated run last night; Nathaniel, Maggie, and Jesse, who have seen every episode, watched it together and then sat down for a discussion, moderated by Marisa, about the episode and the series (with some long-distance questions from our upstate Sorkin correspondent Rob). We talk about what went right with The Newsroom, why Season 3 might have been its best season ever, and, oh yeah, why there was still so much about it that we found deeply frustrated. It’s a must-listen for anyone who watched The Newsroom, loved The Newsroom, hate-watched The Newsroom, or wants to hear periodic bursts of impromptu Newsroom fanfic.
Our album of the year is St. Vincent by St. Vincent. Five of us put together wildly different album lists, and this was the common ground, appearing on every single one, often near the top. We were all at least somewhat familiar with St. Vincent’s work before this year, but her self-titled record blows her past, merely good albums off whatever planet she’s from. As gratifying as it’s been to see female pop artists completely take over the charts over the past couple of years, it’s hard not to see St. Vincent as the new-millennium female pop star (which is to say: pop star) for the smart set. Below, Marisa, Sara, Rob, and Jesse piece together what we love about this album from its eleven wonderful songs.
From her robotic live show choregoraphy to the growth she shows on St. Vincent, it’s clear that Annie Clark enjoyed her time working with David Byrne. I may have mentioned this before, but I am big into opening tracks. I probably read too much into the chioce of “Rattlesnake” as the leadoff to this record, but who cares when the song is this good. Twilight Zone paranoia fights it way over layers of synths and guitars with a bouncy beat to boot (and, maybe most unnerving of all, apparently based on a true story). It’s like so many tracks on this album: so many great things at once. – Rob
St. Vincent is by far my favorite artist prone to adding “in America” at the end of a phrase. I mean, that sounds like a go-to parody move for making your lyrics sound as all-encompassingly pompous as possible. And yet in “Birth in Reverse,” for my money the catchiest song on this record, it functions more as a locator. The song opens with a description of ordinary household activities (of a sort), and the chorus’s description of what she sees “through the blinds,” “a birth in reverse in America,” feels like a zoom-out to a Google Maps view of where-ever the hell you bide your downtime when you’re the lady from St. Vincent. (Bonus points for the phrase “birth in reverse” supposedly coming from Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America.) The view from St. Vincent’s window sounds especially jittery because the music moves at a relentless pace that sounds like a workout video going amok. Whether it’s making a sweeping statement about America or, potentially worse, making a sweeping statement about how we all view the world through a digital lens (see track 5), St. Vincent makes opportunities for pomposity sound palatable, and palatable things sound extremely fucking weird. – Jesse
True fact: I am the last one to turn in my St. Vincent write-up. That’s because I’ve spent a lot of time trying to sort through all my feelings about “Prince Johnny,” apart from the feeling that I love it. She starts off the song by saying, “You’re kind, but you’re not simple.” The same can be said for the song: It’s pleasant, but it’s not simple. That’s why music writers have twisted themselves into knots trying to describe it, layering on these really purple words, like calling it a “a luxuriant, rhythmic ballad with a melancholic, detailed narrative.” I’m not criticizing. It needs this kind of description. I would add these equally flowery words: haunting, longingly, soaring, enigmatic, elegiac, and heartbreaking. Kind-but-simple words do not do justice.
When I saw St. Vincent at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland this year, we got there late and had a less-than-ideal position in the crowd. Much of my view was obstructed for most of the concert. But, when she played “Prince Johnny,” she climbed atop of a tower of amps and sang it from far above the crowd. I understand that Clark is known for crazy stage antics, but I’m glad she made sure that “Prince Johnny” got a big moment in the show, even though it’s a quiet song. – Marisa
I’ve always thought of politics as incidental to St. Vincent’s music. It’s certainly there, as in the Strange Mercy closer “Year of the Tiger,” but usually it’s subtextual instead of foregrounded. But she must have picked up on something in the air because in a year marked by racial strife and protests against police brutality she fortuitously named a song for one of the founders of the Black Panthers. Newton had no lack of trouble in his short life as an activist: he was jailed (and later acquitted) for the murder of a police officer, and eventually was shot and killed by a member of the Black Guerilla Family, a prison and street gang in Oakland, in a neighborhood he had once helped revitalize. St. Vincent’s music often walks the line between beauty and insanity and nowhere is that more evident than the brilliantly structured song that bears his name. The opening verses, unfolding over a spacey jazz beat as St. Vincent’s voice reaches higher into her register, are ominous and nonsensical, conjuring images of “cardboard cutthroats” and “fuckless porn sharks.” Then it makes a brutal break, a jagged guitar riff crashing in as she shifts into righteous fury, literally shredding everything that’s come before. We’re in “perpetual night” now among motherless creatures and misfits and she’s not afraid to leave us there. Though no explicit political statement is made, it’s pretty clear which lot St. Vincent throws herself in with and it’s not those who are “safe, safe, and safest.” – Sara
If there can be said to be a through line in St. Vincent’s album it may well be a rejection of our current cultural consumption, or at least a pointed critique. Many of the songs sound like observational transmissions from an alien being and that hits its zenith with “Digital Witness.” Is there any mantra that speaks more to the anxieties of the modern age, and damns them more, than “If I can’t show it, if you can’t see me, what’s the point of doing anything?” The popularity of Facebook, Instagram, and all the other social media sites we congregate on has turned us all into digital witnesses of one another, less living life than performing it, and St. Vincent means to wrench us away. “I want all of your mind,” she commands, and the song is catchy enough that we’ll readily give it to her. The instrumentation bears some of the hallmarks of her recent collaboration with David Byrne with its swaggering guitar and bright stuttering horns. There’s something pleasingly artificial about the sound, which ends up embracing the synthetic texture of modern life as much as it sends it up. Any musician worth her salt is hyper aware of how she presents herself to her audience and for all her otherworldliness St. Vincent is no different. “Won’t somebody sell me back to me?” she asks at the song’s end but if anyone is in control here, it’s her. – Sara
Clark, queen of the slow jam! It’s a shame that mixtape-making isn’t the way that young people court each other anymore. “I Prefer Your Love” would be a good song to have stashed away for a deal-sealing cassette. Even if the intended could resist the “I prefer your love to Jesus” opening lyric on account of silliness, there’s no way the “All the good in me is because of you” wouldn’t work. Sorry, kids. You’ll never find anything as beautiful on Tindr. – Marisa
Annie Clark claims she’s thirty two years old, but it’s more likely that she’s an ageless visitor from another planet. The clues go beyond her increasing comfort in loosening her human façade and dressing more like one of our new otherworldly overlords. Take “Regret” for example. There is a level of reflection and knowing world-weariness to these lyrics that I just don’t see coming from someone my little sister’s age. Musically, she has experimented more with her sound than most rock stars do during their entire career. “Reget” sees her try out a bunch of new guitar tones and play with rhythm by having the bass line in the chorus go against everything. She also shows off her vocal range here as well just for fun. “Regret” is so next-level, there’s no way she hasn’t been secretly working on her music for at least decades. I bow down to our new ruler. – Rob
DRONE 1: DID YOU LISTEN TO THIS MESSAGE? ST. VINCENT IS ORDERING ALL OF US TO BRING HER OUR LOVES.
DRONE 2: OH, LIKE, WE SHOULD EACH BRING HER ONE OF OUR FAVORITE THINGS?
DRONE 1: SHE SAYS ALL OF THEM.
DRONE 2: ALL OF THEM?
DRONE 1: YEAH. SHE SOUNDS PRETTY SERIOUS.
DRONE 2: DID SHE SAY WHAT SHE WANTS TO DO WITH THEM?
DRONE 1: SHE WANTS TO LOVE THEM TOO.
DRONE 2: WELL THAT SOUNDS PRETTY HARMLESS.
DRONE 1: I THINK YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO THE MESSAGE.
DRONE 2: OH JESUS. THIS SOUNDS SERIOUS.
DRONE 1: YOU SEE?
DRONE 2: THIS SONG IS NOT THAT LOUD IN THE BROADER SCHEME OF LOUD MUSIC, BUT IT STILL SOUNDS LIKE IT’S HAPPENING IN ALL CAPS.
DRONE 1: STOP WASTING TIME, WE NEED TO BRING OUR LOVES TO HER IMMEDIATELY.
DRONE 2: I’M REALLY GOING TO MISS MY PUPPY. – Jesse
I have listened to this album countless times. I have listened to the Lady Gaga song “Edge of Glory” exactly as many times as I’ve heard it in a public place since it was released (I would estimate about ten). Yet every single time I hear St. Vincent sing “…’cause I’m on the edge of a heart attack” in this song, her intonation leads me to expect her to sing “on the edge of glory.” This is embarrassing because St. Vincent is vastly superior to Lady Gaga and annoying because it sometimes actually manages to get “Edge of Glory” into my head, but also, finally, a useful point of comparison, because Annie Clark, as St. Vincent, does all of the weird, inventive, artsy shapeshifting that Stefani Germanotta does as Lady Gaga. Hell, the transition from the stuttering verses of “Psychopath” to the lusher orchestration of its chorus and back again to minimalist beats and angular guitar is more dynamic than most of Gaga’s costumed-up club boilerplate. Of course, 2014 is kind of a silly time to be picking on Lady Gaga; St. Vincent makes it plentifully easy to just listen to something better.
This song is also very good, but instead of writing about it, I wanted to share with you a sampling of some of Annie’s magnificent hairstyles from this year. – Rob
A lot of St. Vincent, the album, is hepped-up and robo-dance-y; even the slow jams feel like they’re about to explode into something more menacing (and by virtue of being followed by “Huey Newton” and “Regret,” they do). But the album closer feels like the St. Vincent version of a torch song or a Broadway finale. I know those things sound (a.) contradictory and (b.) not particularly descriptive of a song with so much evisceration imagery. But can’t you just imagine Annie Clark in a semi-robotic pose with a handheld microphone, arm outstretched to the crowd as she warbles matter-of-factly yet emotively about her crossed fingers lying in rubble? (I have to imagine it, because the two times I saw St. Vincent in concert this year, she neglected to play this song.) Lush but unsentimental, glorious and strange: this is St. Vincent closing up a near-perfect record. – Jesse
It sounded like a lame joke I might make to myself or on Twitter: Rolling Stone has thought it over, and they’ve decided that the best, most interesting, and/or most inspiring albums of 2014 are: the one that U2 gave away for free, and the one that Bruce Springsteen pulled together from a decade of outtakes. I like U2 and I’ve got love for latter-day Springsteen. But the question remains:
Don’t you think we can do better?
Not every music publication’s best-music list is as lame as Rolling Stone‘s, of course, but there is a certain familiarity and timidity in a whole lot of them. The kind of over-the-top poptimism that gives Taylor Swift a lot of bonus points for making an album that isn’t unlistenable and that a lot of people bought. Or the kind of inclusiveness that insists you need to count down 50 top albums of the year, which is to say mention a lot without really calling anything way better than anything else. I understand that a crap-ton of albums are released every year. But is a list of 50 a best-of, or is it an abridged chronology?
So here’s the SportsAlcohol.com music nerds to tell you what’s what. Rob, Marisa, Sara, Craig and I submitted fairly disparate Best Albums lists and rallied around a few top vote-getters to create our rock-solid top five. We’re pretty sure it’s the best one on the internet. So there’s nothing left to do but enjoy it. And then argue with us like we’re Rolling Stone.
Continue reading The Top Five Best Albums of 2014
This week, SportsAlcohol.com writers are recounting the best music of 2014. Today’s Track Marks focus on individual songs from albums that didn’t make our collective top five, but did appear on our individual best-album ballots.
It took me awhile to get into Angel Olsen’s fantastic 2014 record Burn Your Fire For No Witness. This seems to be a pattern with me as I was late in discovering Waxahatchee last year, an artist who shares some surface DNA with Olsen. Both are lone females with shuddery but commanding voices and country-tinged compositions that seem to issue directly from the parts of the American South that rarely get visitors. To me, though, Olsen feels like the more risky, eccentric artist. Even after multiple listens to the album it’s impossible to predict from moment to moment what side of herself she’ll reveal next: brash and boot stomping, sinister and threatening, achy and longing. She could as easily back a bar fight as a slow dance.
“Lights Out” finds her in torch singer mode. It hits at the mid-point of the album and at first seems like something of a comedown before she’ll rev up again in the back half. It starts with a simple guitar line and drum beat, Olsen warbling to an indecisive lover, “If you don’t feel good about it then turn around. If you really mean it baby then stand your ground.” There’s resignation in her voice but also a whiff of impatience. Olsen has spent much of the record grappling with loneliness but she also knows indifference is no substitute for love. The song builds with each verse, adding texture and volume until it bursts open in a moment of fist pumping conviction: “No one’s gonna see your life through, there’s no way.” If Olsen’s voice sometimes sounds like a candle on the verge of going out, this is her as the fire about to consume the house. The torch she’s carrying turns out to be for herself.
