[ ephemeral flights into dreamlike impressionism ] [ album reviews ]
➤ cibo matto | AMega-funky art-pop superheroes Cibo Matto are back and they’ve found a new place to dwell. Love — and ghosts — are in the air at Hotel Valentine (Chimera), a swingin’ hotel-themed musical setting with a fully equipped super-relaxed lounge, quasi-tropical tiki bar and bangin’ hip-hop/electro-funk nightclub. The album is creeping with paranormal activity, but Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori are no mere specters of their former selves: They’re just as fruity, funny, jazzy —K. Ross Hoffman and snazzy as ever.
➤ wild beasts | B+ It takes time to reveal itself, but Wild Beasts’ fourth album ultimately emerges as the plumpest, ripest fruit yet from England’s preeminent surrealist romantics. A less dramatic evolutionary step than its predecessors, Present Tense (Domino) retains the decadent viscosity, swooningly sinuous grooves and immaculate precision of 2011’s dark, lustful Smother, but adopts a brighter outlook and an —K. Ross Hoffman even lusher, more synth-swaddled palette.
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➤ sun kil moon | A
The review of Philadelphia books
Mark Kozelek’s music has always been poignant and personal, but he’s never cut a record as nakedly intimate or profoundly affecting as Sun Kil Moon’s Benji (Caldo Verde). A rambling cycle of plainspoken, minutely detailed recollections set atop spartan nylonstring fingerlings and rubbed-raw acoustic blues — touching on all varieties of death (of family members, acquaintances, celebrities; in freak accidents, mass murders, assisted suicides) — it stacks blithering mundanity alongside excruciating sentiment until the two become indistinguishable. —K. Ross Hoffman
➤ tinariwen | B+ Ibrahim Ag Alhabib has plugged his guitars back in, he’s traded TV on the Radio for the goddamn Chili Peppers, and when the part of Mali he and his band often call home finally capitulated to sectarian ruin, they traded the Sahara for Joshua Tree. But Emmaar (Anti) still has all Tinariwen’s quiet desert-caravan rumble. Phrases become chants, Alhabib’s growl undulates, groove abounds and — have mercy — they still play the blues. —Dotun Akintoye
[ movie review ]
THE WIND RISES [ A- ] A VAGUE TENSION permeates The Wind Rises, the final film directed by anima-
tion auteur and Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki. How could it not? Since debuting in Japan this summer, this semi-fictionalized biopic of Japanese aircraft engineer Jiro Horikoshi has been the subject of controversy. Western film festival audiences saw Miyazaki romanticizing the Japanese World War II machine, as Jiro designed the prototype of the fighter plane used in the attack on Pearl Harbor; Japanese right wingers took offense to Miyazaki’s pacifist lens in his depiction of their country’s fever for war in the 1930s and ’40s. These reactions, while not unreasonable, distract from the film’s essence — a hope-filled, wide-eyed portrait of a man who only wishes to build beautiful things. For Jiro (Joseph GordonLevitt), those beautiful things are airplanes. The Wind Rises follows Jiro through his childhood to his enrollment in engineering school in the wake of Japan’s Kanto earthquake, to his time working for an aircraft manufacturer and his romance with tuberculosis-stricken Naoko (Emily Blunt). While the film is a departure from Studio Ghibli’s fantasy-heavy back catalogue, Miyazaki’s visual shorthand is stronger than ever, striking a grounded biography with ephemeral flights into dreamlike impressionism, like when images of shattered aircraft machinery smolder at Jiro’s feet, hinting that Japan’s plunge into war is quickly approaching. The tale is handled with incredible poetic sensitivity and dulled sadness; we know how this story is going to end. But Jiro doesn’t. Near the film’s end, a roomful of engineers are mulling over his final blueprints, trying to find a way to make the plane lighter. Jiro earnestly suggests removing the guns. The entire room bursts into laughter. —Marc Snitzer
Those beautiful things are airplanes.
FLYING HIGH: The final film from anime master Hayao Miyazaki tells the story of a sensitive fighter-plane designer.
GLUTTON FOR PUNISHMENT ➤ WHEN PHILADELPHIA POLICE officerturned Food and Drug Administration agent Tony Chu politely turns down a meal, he’s not trying to be rude — eating can be a nightmare for him. Chu is one of three known cibopaths in the world, and has that classic #CibopathProblem where he learns the horrible details, histories and secrets of whatever he eats — including people. It’s a plot device that gives Chew Volume 1: Taster’s Choice, a collection of the first five Chew issues, its distinct flavor in the realm of pulp detective comics. Writer John Layman knows where the line into overt camp territory is drawn, and dips just far enough past it. Chew’s America is one where poultry sale and consumption is illegal under the guise of a killer bird flu. Chicken black markets have sprung up around the country, and Chu finds himself at the whim of the FDA, forced to eat his way through fingers, faces and other human remains to uncover potential government conspiracies. Chew is not an overtly pretty comic. Rob Guillory’s illustrations are angular, dizzying and nauseous — but it works in Chew’s grease-filmed world. Midway through the collection, Chu is given orders to arrest food critic Amelia Mintz in her newspaper’s office. When the terrorist group E.G.G. bursts in and demands the paper publish its manifesto at gunpoint, the critic reads her latest negative review aloud. They can’t stop vomiting. (Mintz is a saboscrivner — she can describe food to a point of inducing the taste in the listener.) In a gorgeously sickening half-page panel, Chu watches in awe, doused in moss-green puke. He’s in love. —Marc Snitzer
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Chew Volume 1: Taster’s Choice
John Layman and illustrator Rob Guillory (IMAGE COMICS, 2009, 128 PP)
✚ If you know of any really good books to review please email mikala@citypaper.net.
C I T Y PA P E R . N E T | F E B R U A R Y 2 7 - M A R C H 5 , 2 0 1 4 | P H I L A D E L P H I A C I T Y PA P E R |
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