Released first in March of this year, A Collection Of Songs Written and Recorded 1995-1997 and Oh Holy Fools are the weakest of the bundle of six. The former, put out in 1998, has all the messy irreverence and guttural vocals of later Bright Eyes work with only the promise of more satisfying melodic accompaniment (such as on “The Awful Sweetness of Escaping Sweat”). Everywhere on the album, Oberst’s turns conjure to mind the sort of blackened scrawl you’d expect a high school freshman to deliver in what he believes is his best Baudelaire or Bukowski. “Saturday As Usual” grates; the reel-to-reel stomp of “I Watched You Taking Off” inches toward something greater, as does “A Few Minutes On Friday” – an attempt at the scaled-up sound of future output. Whereas A Collection of Songs is uneven, however, Oh Holy Fools is largely unexciting (to borrow a lyric from another record, “There is this boredom/ That drowns everything”). The tracks languish, meander and otherwise lack forward motion.

Bright Eyes’ debut LP, Letting Off The Happiness was where everything coalesced for the first time: the overwrought lyrics, the emotive straining, his affinity for tossed-off lines and letting imbalanced compulsions run songs haphazardly into the sea. It represented, in a way, the broken sweat that heralded the later fever dream, or a conscious first step out of the darkened miasma into a more controlled, infrequently-ragged moroseness. A tipped, capsized ship of a record, Letting Off The Happiness gave a hint (as on the wild, shambling “Pull My Hair”) as to the dialectic at work between Bright Eyes releases – perfect, obvious examples of this being the future pair of aesthetic opposites, 2004’s Digital Ash In A Digital Urn and I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning. Diversionary strands are subsequently followed, with the barest textures sneaking onto “Padraic My Prince,” the appearance of pedal steel (Oberst’s bandmate and fellow Monster of Folk Mike Mogis’) on “The Difference In The Shades” and the warble and breeze, like a Daniel Johnston miniature, of “June On The West Coast.” And twisted opener “If Winter Ends” still holds Bright Eyes at their skittering, hoarse best – drunk and howling. On the Every Day and Every Night EP, Son, Ambulance’s Joe Knapp pairs with Oberst on the slow-rising “A Line Allows Progress, A Circle Does Not,” while Oberst’s energetic waver on “A Perfect Sonnet” prefigures the effervescent folk oddities of the Dodos or Spinto Band.

So what of Fevers and Mirrors? By the album’s release in 2000, Bright Eyes had shed almost wholly the lo-fi intimacy so many outfits before and after similarly doffed following initial releases (even Oberst’s sometime collaborators M. Ward and Kevin Barnes of Of Montreal). Along with a smoother production sheen, the band also opted for more tightly-controlled arrangements, lyrics hung heavy (you could say heavy-handedly) with recurrent motifs and a pervasive sense of unabashed self-absorption, verging on solipsism. The result is cramped and insular, but open-ended and extraordinary – evoking a singular state of being and feeling that is monomaniacal in scope but wildly divergent in form. It slithers through the sullen and surly “Arienette,” the implacably, intensely excitable “The Calendar Hung Itself” and “Haligh, Haligh, A Lie, Haligh.” All have punch; all fight admirably for the album to retain its former, gritty luster. “An Attempt To Tip The Scales” and “A Song To Pass The Time” are perhaps, however, the album’s crowning achievements, the turn in tone from rueful to gentle resignation that the back half of Fevers and Mirrors never foreshadows. And the final EP of the reissues bundle, There Is No Beginning To The Story, affords a glimpse at the liquid bombast of Lifted, Fevers And Mirrors’ successor, beginning with that latter album’s opener, the exceptional “From A Balance Beam.”

Although, as Oberst sings in “June On The West Coast,” he’s today still slinging “sad and simple chords,” “still shaking from those secrets that we’re told,” Letting Off The Happiness and Fevers and Mirrors are probably the closest Oberst (and Bright Eyes) has come to apotheosis so far in his career, and the EPs reissued alongside them allow the listener to track Bright Eyes’ progress on that path. Say what you must of everything that has followed in the last decade, it’s inarguable that Oberst has felt no qualms – and indeed derived much of his very earliest success – from, as “Conor Oberst” puts it in the fake interview appended to Fevers and Mirrors’ “An Attempt To Tip The Scales,” whispering all his darkest secrets into the microphone.

Spring onions were a first of my own—the first vegetable I embraced while learning to cook in my mom’s kitchen. Unlike other tasty vegetables, which can require a gauntlet of scraping and peeling and roasting and steaming into submission, spring onions require minimal prep with a giant flavor payoff. Just a quick dice and the onion is ready to perk up any dish with a fresh, savory punch. As a kid, they were my go-to toppings for baked potatoes and chili dogs. Although I still won’t say no to a sloppy green-garnished chili dog, I’ve moved the onions into my stir fries, crab cakes, and my personal favorite, Sriracha-mayonnaise for banh mi sandwiches.

This recipe for Spring Onion Spaetzle is also from my grown-up recipe canon, and is a nice change of pace from the rice pilaf/roast potato/couscous/repeat side dish rut I find myself in. Spaetzle is a tiny, pasta-like dumpling that complements all your standard proteins: chicken, steak, pork chops and stuffed sole all play nice with these flavors. If you’re a serious German food fiend, you can get a spaetzle maker (which looks like a cheese grater) at specialty kitchen stores. Otherwise a standard colander over boiling water works just fine. Feel free to chop those onions down to the lightest green portion of the white; that’s where the most intense flavor lives.

Spring Onion Spaetzle

1 cup all-purpose flour

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 eggs

¼ cup milk

½ tsp. nutmeg, ground

1/8 tsp. black pepper

½ tsp. salt

2 spring onions (green onions, scallions or ramps), minced

3 Tbsp butter

1/3 cup grated Romano cheese

Additional spring onion, sliced into strips

¼ cup fresh parsley, chopped

Bring a large pasta pot full of salted water to a boil. Meanwhile, in a medium mixing bowl, mix together flour, salt, pepper, nutmeg, garlic, minced spring onions and salt. Whisk eggs and milk together in a separate bowl, then add to the flour mixture in thirds, thoroughly stirring to incorporate after each addition.

Place your spaetzle maker or colander on top of the pot, and press the batter through the holes into the water, one spoonful at a time. Dumplings will cook and rise to the top—allow to boil for five minutes. Remove from heat and drain.

Warm the butter in a nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add drained spaetzle and sauté in butter until dumplings develop a very light crust, 5-7 minutes. Add cheese, additional onion and parsley, along with salt and pepper to taste. When cheese has melted, remove from heat and serve.

Family has a complex, inexorable pull on a person. Devotion to loved ones can persist beyond the easily defined borders of logic and drive someone to make choices that might otherwise strike them as unthinkable. Sometimes there can be no greater motivator than insuring the safety, or even merely the relative comfort, of those residing on the closest branches of a family tree. An examination of just that brand of amplified motivation is at the heart of Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Elena.

The film features Nadezhda Markina in the title role. As the film begins, she begins the day moving slowly around a well-apportioned apartment, eventually waking an elderly man named Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov), who, it can be quickly intuited, is the owner of the space. Initially Zvyagintsev is deliberately vague about their relationship, making it seem as though she’s his caretaker (she sleeps in a separate, far more modest bedroom, for example). They converse over breakfast, the exchange weighted with history between them, largely defined by knowledge of each other’s children that is both intimate and distant. They talk as if they understand the other’s parental relationships, but aren’t really a part of them. Eventually, it comes to the surface that these two are actually married, the end result of a relationship that began a decade earlier when she served as his nurse in the hospital.

The screenplay Zvyagintsev wrote with Oleg Negin dispenses its details with immense patience, a quality that the director mirrors with the pacing and structure of the shots. The film opens by holding a shot of an unremarkable, bare tree branch outside of a window for long enough to make the kind of moviegoer who can’t wait to see Battleship break out in anxiety hives. It’s nearly ten minutes before a single line of dialogue is spoken and Zvyagintsev focuses on the mundane and uneventful throughout, tagging along tirelessly as Vladimir drives out of his parking garage or as a hospital attendant begins the process of cleaning a recently vacated room. While other directors employ this technique to heighten some pending cataclysm, for Zvyagintsev it’s merely an acknowledgment that this is the common pace of life. Even when sadness strikes or terrible decisions are made, it typically doesn’t happen with the headlong rush seen in the movies.

Elena faces such a decision when a few troubling incidents converge. Her unemployed, somewhat uncouth son (Alexey Rozin) begins pressuring her for the money it will take to get her grandson (Igor Ogurtsov) into college instead of being stuck into the army. At roughly the same time, Vladimir suffers a heart attack, leaving him housebound until a hefty regiment of medication that Elena is called upon to administer. When Vladimir subsequently refuses to give her the money she’s asked for, she begins contemplating what different troubling recourses might be available. It is the stuff of classic film noir with the moody shadows replaced by the unyielding light of day.

There are times when Zvyagintsev’s achingly slow pacing works against the film somewhat, developing a mesmerizing quality that detracts from the emotion of the dilemmas onscreen. While Markina is quite good as Elena, the role is conceived as so passive that it makes the calculation that emerges in the final act come across as a little unlikely. That’s part of Zvyagintsev’s point – villainous actions can be perpetrating by the most unassuming souls – but his predilection for the inscrutable undercuts the drama. That issue is made even clearer by the presence of Vladimir’s daughter Katerina (Elena Lyadova), who is vividly drawn in a just a few scenes, appraising her stepmother with withering intellectual disdain and showing how combativeness can be its own sort of affection. Lyadova is terrific, immediately commanding and slyly powerful in demonstrating the ways that her character has figured out the weakness and deceptions of all those around her.

Vladimir’s relationship with Katerina provides a telling contrast with the one Elena shares with her kin. Where she is helpless before her son’s bullying, Vladimir and Katerina push back and forth at one another, each piece of the exchange another challenge. Like Elena’s equivocations to her son, Vladimir perhaps allows Katerina to get away with more than he would anyone else, but there’s a strong sense of how the two of them have earned their shared alliance, tenuous as it may be. Their path together may be fraught with challenges, but they know it, they’ve accepted it and they surreptitiously draw strength from it. In Zvyagintsev’s estimation, that may be a little nobler, but it won’t necessarily keep them safe, not from each other and certainly not from anyone outside of their immediate family circle. Not when they’ve got their own family allegiances to preserve and protect.

In an era where making professional-quality music outside of a studio is easier than ever, fuzz has gained surprisingly renewed prominence. Practically extinct as a gritty side effect, it’s reasserted itself in a spate of bands who trade heavily in distortion, applied to distance themselves from the squeaky clean textures of bedroom pop and electronica. This has led to an interesting new dynamic of artifice in rock, with bands signaling their lo-fi roots through affectation rather than grimy necessity.

On the downside, distortion can be used for sneakier ends, to cloak warmed over junk under the guise ironically remote fuzziness. This has become increasingly clear on albums like Best Coast’s The Only Place, which further revealed all the intrinsic shoddiness lurking within the shimmering shell of 2010’s Crazy for You. The debut album from Australia’s Royal Headache, thankfully withstands such scrutiny a little better. Their music may be covered in buffering noise, and they may use fuzz as a banner signaling their hard-edged, classic punk allegiances, but it’s never employed as a crutch. Rough but carefully designed, these songs contain an essential soulfulness that has nothing to do with distortion.

The album opens with the roaring snarl of “Never Again” which establishes the fixed template that the band will work from: racing tempos, searing guitars, curtailed vocal melodies that almost skirt the edges of doo-wop. Lead singer Shogun’s voice proves to be the engine here, and it shines underneath the group’s speedy assault, repeatedly threatening to burst into full croon, instead dragged along by the force and tempo of the music. Tracks like “Surprise” feel like an ongoing battle between Shogun’s voice and the lock-step rhythm section keeping the song hurtling along; it clocks in at just over 90 seconds. The methods may not change all that much, but these songs are short and dynamically temperamental enough that it never grows tired.

The band’s mix of punk and R&B represents just a slightly different spin on a common post-punk formula. The Motown-influenced angle explored here ultimately feels viable because Shogun has the pipes and vocal charisma to back it up. He also has versatility. On “Psychotic Episode” the singer suddenly affects a snide English lilt, recalling Dave Vanian of The Doomed. The sudden change serves as a reminder of what we’ve been dealing with: an Australian who’s been affecting a false American accent for the majority of the album. Royal Headache may be wreathed in artifice, but this doesn’t detract from its impressive power.

Given the recent glut of blockbusters about crime-fighters in spandex, conditions were ripe in 2010 for a witty skewering of superhero clichés. The humorless mythology of superhero origins, the hyperbolism of supervillainy, the rigid black-and-white morality contrasted with the legal paradox of vigilante justice, the schmaltzy romances, the campy banter; comic book culture has plenty of kryptonite to contend with, yet has still soared to critical acclaim and supersized box office returns. But for a genre featuring protagonists wearing their underpants on the outside, superhero lore has taken itself far too seriously for far too long. By 2010, the world needed an indie movie to rise up and knock self-important comic book adaptations down a peg. Unfortunately, Kick-Ass is not that film.

Despite gags on par with the sophistication of American Pie, director Matthew Vaughn does manage to lay the groundwork for what could’ve been the great superhero lampooning. He simply refuses to follow through on the setup and instead regresses to a conventional superhero storyline told through stylish splatter porn. But there’s a twist: a child doles out the most savage massacres, and she curses like a sailor. Anyone not on-board with that must be unhip, right? Vaughn proceeds as if this gimmick precludes the need for three-dimensional characters or any semblance of plausibility.

As far as the plot goes, high-school quasi-geek Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) trades in compulsive jerking off for a tacky wetsuit and a stab at crime-fighting. Through his intrusive narration, Dave emphasizes that this decision was not the result of anything in particular. Donning the titular moniker and taking to the streets, he’s promptly knifed in the gut and run over by a car. Due to boredom, he’s compelled to continue his asinine quest and finds that his implanted metal plates and fucked-up nerve endings actually make him slightly more resistant to pain. Dave achieves YouTube acclaim when he actually manages to defend someone. He revels in the notoriety from his new found (albeit secret) identity, but he’s soon in over his head when he invades an organized crime hideout to defend the honor of a girl he hopes to bang. In the face of certain death, he’s rescued by Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz), a hyper-violent 11-year old, and her ex-cop father, Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage), both of whom are fixated on killing crime boss Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong) for contrived reasons. The plot devices don’t matter, because this movie is almost solely about the shock value of an 11-year old girl shouting vulgarities while eviscerating roomfuls of goons.

Critics heralded Kick-Ass as “refreshingly iconoclastic,” “defiantly irreverent” and “twisted fun,” and the little superhero movie that could raked in nearly $100 million worldwide. Those voicing dissent wrung their hands over Hit Girl’s use of the C-word and preponderance of F-bombs and, to a lesser extent, her indiscriminate slaughtering of grown men without an ounce of emotion. But I’m all for a bit of the old ultra-violence if it illustrates a point or provides at least a shred of commentary, even something as simple as an “Are you not entertained?” moment. Instead, Vaughn opts for a bait-and-switch, shucking the satirical setup in favor of embracing the genre’s most egregious clichés.

Once Big Daddy and Hit Girl show up and, later, D’Amico’s son Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) also dons a cape, Kick-Ass embodies what it sets out to parody. Uttering bromides such as “pick on someone your own size” and repeating well-worn catchphrases like “say hello to my little friend” doesn’t constitute satire simply because it’s spoken in a sarcastic tone. And violence isn’t funny simply because it’s gruesome or shockingly enacted by a child. A film isn’t automatically edgy when an exploitatively unhinged father also calls his adorable little assassin “baby doll,” no matter how badly its director wishes he was Quentin Tarantino.

Kick-Ass suffers from a void of humanity. Not even the titular protagonist is a very good person. Dave laughs off the death of his mother, who drops dead in front of him from an aneurysm in the darkest of slapstick. He pretends to be gay in order to nail pretty girl Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca) next to a dumpster. Meanwhile, Hit Girl murders dozens before watching her father immolated, and it barely makes a dent.

By throwing plausibility out the window halfway through (tiny Hit Girl possesses superhuman strength and Kick-Ass intuits how to deftly operate a jetpack) any hope of meaningful commentary or character development goes with it. And just because a film wraps itself in the label of satire and throws in stylish action sequences doesn’t mean it’s freed from the obligation to give the viewer at least one fleshed out character to root for.

Kick-Ass’ flaws were further highlighted when the similarly premised Super hit (incredibly fewer) theaters a year later. Instead of seeking out the role of masked protector on a lark, Rainn Wilson’s delusional Crimson Bolt does so because he follows a perceived divine calling to rescue his imperiled wife. Wilson’s character is even more passionate than he is misguided, and when he gets wrapped up with Ellen Page’s overzealously mayhem-oriented Boltie, the culmination isn’t anything akin to Kick-Ass’ deus ex machina; it’s Boltie getting half her fucking head blown off because that’s what happens when everyday people try to take the law into their own hands.

With such a far superior average-joe-turned-makeshift-superhero movie out there, the question needs to be asked, what is Kick-Ass skewering? You can’t claim realism only when it benefits you and hide behind the shield of parody when it’s convenient. You can’t base the appeal of a movie on an everyman premise if the rules of the everyday world don’t apply. Kick-Ass cherry-picks the best from both worlds in order to perpetuate clichés for cheap laughs. If you want to watch true superhero satire with actual real-world consequences, see Super. If you prefer one-dimensional characters and unimaginative gore for the sake of gore, by all means, queue up Kick-Ass and knock yourself out.

After a 30-minute phone call, Wagner discussed his new record, Major League Baseball, quiet concerts and the ghost of Chesnutt that lingers over his music. I found Wagner forthcoming, friendly and quick to laugh. Mr. M is easily on my shortlist for album of the year. I am pleased to present the Spectrum Culture interview with Kurt Wagner.

Mr. M is such an introverted record. Some music reaches out and pulls you in and some meets you halfway. However, this one forces you to come to it.

I’m not quite sure there was a plan with that. I don’t know, it just came out of the way I decided to go about making music for this record and in general. I’ve been at it so long at this point that when the time came to make the record we decided to just take our time about it and just go the way we wanted to go. There wasn’t any sort of agenda ahead of us. It was just wide open. It was kinda like give everything we had to this record. I mean literally everything and just go for it. It came the way it came. There certainly wasn’t some kind of design to draw people in or anything like that. It was just putting it all out there.

Like a lot of Lambchop albums, this record has a real lived-in sort of quality to it.

That’s probably due to us taking our time about it. We let it take as long as it took and thought about it conceptually first and having an idea both sonically and as far as the songs go and the way we went about making it. It took a lot of records to get to that point where suddenly it all comes together in a way that is pretty natural, but at the same time there was some sort of idea that the producer and engineer Mark Nevers had in mind and what I had in mind as far as the type of songs and the way I wanted to present them. We put those two things together and we were able to make this record.

The one song I keep obsessing over is “2B2.” There are certainly lyrical flourishes that I really enjoy. I’m not a lyrics person normally but the part I really love is, “I swear it looks like England/ Yeah,” and then there is that pregnant pause and then, “I think it’s England.” That really sums up the almost wistfulness in the lyricism here.

That’s something about the way I like to communicate. It’s conversational; it’s about trying to have a one-on-one conversation with somebody. Who that person is (in the song) is sort of amorphous but it’s definitely about trying to connect with somebody like the way you do in a conversation. As far as the way I sing, it’s not shouting at you, it’s not crooning to you per se. It’s much more about speaking and listening and being heard.

I also really like the last section: “It was good to talk to you while we’re cooking/ Sounds like we’re making the same the same thing.” I’m curious to know what you’re making.

Basically, what that song is about is a chronicling of events around a significant realization that I had. Upon the day of that happening, I chronicled all the events of that day. At the end of that day, I was cooking a meal and I was talking a friend of mine, Jonathan Marx, who is also part of Lambchop. We were both cooking chickpeas. I was cooking more of a Mediterranean/Italian style chickpea dish and he was cooking an Indian style chickpea dish which involves crazy powders and stuff like that. Mine was more about cooking on a hot surface which was almost like rocks or something.

It is interesting how it can come from something like that.

I think I find that is pretty much what I notice in life and stuff in general. I draw out of experiences that I have or my friends have. Those sort of little moments can end up being more profound if taken and put into a song or given a platform for greater understanding.

It’s like finding gravitas in everything and not forcing it.

True, but then there’s not always gravitas in everything and sometimes it’s a matter of jiggling things into a position where suddenly, yeah, they do mean things. You see that in film all the time where they will focus on a certain inanimate thing but because of where it’s falling in the moment of the drama in the film it suddenly means all so much. Sometime images on their own can be very strong like, “Oh let’s put a steamship stuck in some trees in the Amazon” and that alone can create a lot of stuff around it but that’s an odd event. Sometimes it’s simple events too that can be it all.

Was that a Herzog or a Marquez reference?

I think that was Herzog (laughs).

He’s a great director.

He’s a great imagist, for sure.

I just watched his four hour series about death row.

Ah, man, I want to see that. It’s pretty heavy, I heard.

Did you see Into the Abyss?

Yeah.

It’s pretty different. It’s not as Herzogian where there’s no tree growing through a car. It’s pretty straightforward.

Yeah (laughs).

Speaking of natural imagery, another one of my favorite new songs is “Nice Without Mercy.” In the first verse, you have all these pastoral images, to use your word but then you’re almost surprised that you can take a photograph with a phone amongst all this stuff.

It’s just that suddenly that way of observing and looking and capturing things is accessible to so many people now. It’s suddenly as if we’ve become people who look at things differently, through a lens. Maybe it’s more for, “Oh, it’s just a picture of us friends together” in front of a bar they drank at that night or something like that, but at the same time people are suddenly looking at themselves. Everyone is a documentarian or a photographer. Not everyone, but everyone that carries a phone. Just right there, suddenly people can’t say, “Well, I can’t take pictures,” but they do. There’s a whole generation of people growing up where that’s completely part of who they are and that’s how they go about things. Whether or not they take it to another level or another purpose, who knows? The initial tool is in their hands. It’s like everyone’s gotten glasses or something.

I don’t know about you, but it freaks me the fuck out to go to a concert and watch someone watch the concert through a phone.

It’s insane. That’s right because suddenly it’s also become this filter that is wedged between the experience and it happens all the time now. The way people carry on conversations and they’re texting or working on the computer at the same time while on the phone or even at a coffee shop. They’re right in front of each other, but they’re both sitting there looking at their phones and yet they’re interacting like they normally do, but there is this other filter, this other thing that is going on at the same time. It’s changing the way we interact.

Yeah, things like Skype.

That’s another thing. We can now see each other when we talk on the phone. We could be doing that now, weird as that would have been.

That’s for sure. So, Major League Baseball did not like the title of the new record initially?

Right, it didn’t occur to me that an artist couldn’t call a work of art whatever they wanted to. I always thought he should have that sort of freedom. But apparently, the way things have developed in the last few years, it’s not so. I think it was just an act of caution on our label’s part to preempt any sort of difficulty down the road. It’s a litigious culture we now live in and I certainly didn’t want to cause any trouble for them and I certainly didn’t want to get into a big hoo-ha about it. In my mind, it’s still called Mr. Met. It’s just what we had to call it. Apparently, I can call a song anything I want, but to call a record that is a little more difficult. If we had made a pair of socks, I think we could have gotten a lawsuit for that. It’s true! (laughs)

So I can’t call my new book Mr. Giant or Mr. Twin?

Well, if the mascot for the Giants is whatever and you call it that…I thought the Mets owned it but apparently Major League Baseball owns that. And who knew until we actually asked for permission to do so.

So Mr. Met is an actual mascot?

Well, yeah. It’s the mascot for the New York Mets.

Oh, I thought it was the chicken or something.

No, dude. It’s a dude with a baseball for a head and a little ball cap carrying a bat and a glove (laughs). It sounds silly but everyone could have easily called the record that elsewhere in the world and just let Mr. M be for the US. I was inclined for that solution but there is this whole synergistic notion that people want these days that everything is the same everywhere. I sort of regret knuckling under. I should have kept it at two different names. It’s just not making everybody happy (laughs).

For your next series of paintings you can do the Phillie Phanatic but call it something else.

(laughs) I just run into this problem all the time. As a person that likes to appropriate things in my life in culture into what I write about, it’s almost impossible to find things that aren’t copyrighted. Or aren’t owned by something else, particularly when you’re dealing with phrases and you want to relate the idea. To me, the idea of “Mr. Met” wasn’t about baseball at all. The song isn’t about baseball. It’s got nothing to do with it. It has to do with the participle for “meet” (laughs).

So Shari Lewis didn’t give you any shit when you started out?

That’s it! I live with that over my fucking head! When we started the band we were called Poster Child. There was a group called Poster Children, they were on Warner.

I think I saw them when I was a kid.

Sure, they were cool dudes. The band didn’t fucking care. It was the lawyer for Warners. We had a 7” for chrissakes, a split 7” at that. They found it somehow and we got a cease-and-desist order from Warner Brothers telling us we couldn’t use the name. Wasn’t even the same fucking word. They were Poster Children, we were Poster Child. I was like, “Fine! What are we going to do? Fight the man on that?” Then I was like, “We’ll call it R.E.N., that’s the difference between Poster Child and Poster Children.” Well, that was going to be a little bit of a fucking problem. Jeez, where does it stop? So I picked Lambchop and then, “Duh! Oops!” That’s taken! You know? What the fuck! I don’t know why I run into this all the time. I guess it’s just my bad sense of humor (laughs).

Did the state of Ohio come after you?

Not yet! (laughs)

Maybe they will give you some health insurance or something.

Oh my god, yeah. Let’s do that.

I just got health insurance back for the first time in four years and you don’t know what a privilege it is until it’s gone.

And good luck getting back. Good luck with that. It’s nuts. Even if you have it, it doesn’t mean you’re fucking out of the woods. It’s infuriating and I could just rave on it for a long time but I won’t.

Let’s talk about Lambchop and longevity. I’ve seen interviews where you talk about which records you consider your peaks and valleys. If you could make a sampler for those who have never heard Lambchop which songs would you throw on there?

The trouble is that there are so many of them at this point. Rather than point to any specific songs, there are types of songs I think we do. The first record is a real good example of the various kinds of directions or things that I think Lambchop was into or capable of doing. The things with done over the years have zoomed into various aspects of that. It was quite varied at the time, maybe in its rawness. It is a really great place to start and think about what it is that Lambchop does. It’s just so hard for me to point to any one particular song and say, “Well, that’s pretty good for that” kind of thing. So for a sampler, I don’t know. That’s a difficult thing. I notice that my wife sometimes makes collections of stuff to give to people so they can hear what we fucking sound like. Again, that’s the stuff that she likes. I think because we have these various things that we do, it tends to appeal to different people at different times for different reasons. It’s like a GPS thing that keeps moving when you’re moving around. When we do stuff in that mode, it’s like this is who we are and what we sound like. It’s hard for me to do. I don’t want to stand still or look at it in that kind of way. It’s just who we are at the moment, this is who we are now. We used to tour records but we didn’t realize you were supposed to play music from the record. We had already moved beyond that. We had made that record nine or 10 months ago by then. By then we had already made another record or playing new music. We were just moving on and didn’t realize, “Oh, you have to do that” (laughs). It took a long time to figure that out (laughs).

I’m sure there are some older songs that continue to pop up in the setlist.

Oh, absolutely. This tour has given me the opportunity to just focus on a particular sound and these quieter, more intimate songs that would maybe only get thrown into a set every now and then. Now, we’re doing a whole evening of that kind of music. That’s been fun because it allows us to do those songs that maybe we don’t get to do all the time or just so obscure that people never heard them.

How about some examples?

Oh, we’re playing songs like “Magnificent Obsession,” which is a song you might not even know and “Interrupted,” which is off What Another Man Spills. We’re playing a song we used to play for people’s birthdays that’s called “Grey Lines in Heaven.” I don’t even know if it’s actually recorded. It’s just on a tour CD. We only played it whenever a band member on tour had a birthday. We just played it for them (laughs). It’s a nice way to get out of the death and loss kind of thing and into something more… (laughs) something we kind of like about life.

You’re not touring with strings, although strings are featured on Mr. M.

No. I think that’s a little deceptive to think that’s what this record is about. I also think it’s about this sound I was talking about earlier. This sort of openness, this simplistic, almost minimalist way of treating the songs. For instance, “2B2” doesn’t have strings on it, dude. You go from one song to another on this record and yeah, you remember the strings on the first song and the next song that has it, but in between there is a song without it. You’re not left with, “Hey, that didn’t have strings on it!” You didn’t even think about it.

That’s sly, man.

Yeah, and it’s the sound that’s really going on in the songs, the arrangements, the way we produced it.

So when you play “Gone Tomorrow” live, do you play the entire extended instrumental piece to it?

Yeah, we’re doing the extended piece at the end. Maybe it doesn’t go on quite as long. Again, I think it’s about a restraint thing we got going on as much as anything, which I don’t know people appreciate as much as they should (laughs). The point is that we’ve been doing it on tour without strings, except in Europe, and the feeling is the same. There’s air in the room and there’s a quietness. We’re playing really quiet, man. That is something, in of itself, that is a challenge in today’s clubs. I don’t know. It seems to work pretty well. We’re used to being assaulted, even with a quiet record in a rock club. The sound systems are geared to blast out over conversation and I’m challenging that by going, “Nah, we’re just going to play at conversation level” (laughs). People usually listen…or walk out (laughs).

Yeah, I was kind of concerned that you will be playing this record in a standing room club.

Well, who knows? Maybe I’ll throw some chairs in there if nobody shows up (laughs). Either way, we’ve played the rowdiest fucking Saturday night in Glasgow in a little rowdy rock club and you know what? Within half a song, people were quiet as shit. It was scary, man. People were freaking out and they were like that the whole night. The same thing in a drinking town like Bergen in Norway. Within half a song people were like, “Whoa, what’s going on?” I didn’t say a fucking word. People just did it on their own. There wasn’t an announcement, no signs, no enforcement. It just happened. People kinda figured it out all on their own (laughs).

When I did see you guys on the last tour, it was a really loose set with a lot of jokes.

Yeah, we still like to fuck around.

Do you challenge someone if they are making a lot of noise?

No. What we’re doing is playing about 50 minutes straight without saying a word. We just play one song after another after another. I don’t say anything. Then, after we get done playing Mr. Met, we just start fucking around and joking and all that and everyone just goes, “ah!” and it’s all great after that. We then still play quiet and they still shut up. It’s been really sweet, man, but it’s not like I say anything about it. It’s just been like this for years, watching Vic Chesnutt or watching Low. You realize that people respond to what you’re presenting when you walk out. Yeah, sometimes it doesn’t work and sometimes it can be kind of weird but I think it’s all about the intent. It’s also about how you go about it even before you go on. The kind of music you play, the level of music. You’re letting people figure it out on their own and respond to it. Maybe it’s also that now people are yearning for a time where they’re not coming home with their ears ringing even though they went to see Bon Iver or whatever. There is music there to be listened to, but it’s still pretty fucking loud I think.

I’m glad you brought up Vic Chesnutt, because that will be the final part of the interview. I’ve seen him be confrontational with the audience.

Oh yeah! That was the beautiful thing about Vic – he said exactly what was on his mind.

This record is dedicated to his memory. Is his essence in the actual songwriting?

Oh yeah, it was all in the air, it was in our lives. I wasn’t sure how I was going to go on making music after he passed away. He encouraged me to do this. He’s the guy who egged me on into it. He was always there to listen to what I made. We would basically write these records and make these messages to each other through our music we made. Knowing he’s not around to hear what you’re making and respond to it…I was making records as much knowing he would hear them and now that’s he gone, what’s happening? It took awhile to get my head around that. It was never spoken. It was never like, “I’m making a record about this.” It’s just the result of my experience in my life post-Vic. It was also to all the friends that knew him and miss him. That’s kinda what’s going on. It’s not overt. I could have easily left that off of there and nobody would have known.

I know other musicians like Lucinda Williams wrote songs about him. It’s criminal how small of a community of people know his music. Are there any songs or records by Vic that mean a lot to you?

Little and West of Rome. Little changed my life and West of Rome just cemented the idea that the things he did were just incredible.

Little has to be one of the most emotionally jarring experiences I’ve had on record.

Yeah, and then West of Rome was not just slapping it in during an afternoon but to actually show what an amazing artist he is and was yet to become. It allowed him to really be recognized as an amazing person.

I find it really hard to listen to the song “Granny” on At the Cut.

Yeah, I couldn’t even try to listen to anything until fairly recently. It was just too hard. Yeah, it took a while.

I tend to listen to songs like “Good Morning, Mr. Hard On” now than the more emotionally challenging ones.

(laughs) Yeah.

Until very recently, I had no idea that there was a strong, vocal contingent of people who absolutely despise Bethany Cosentino and her band Best Coast. Certainly I knew that the band must have its detractors. Every musical artist does, especially if they’re the beneficiaries of buzzy success as Best Coast was with their 2010 debut Crazy For You, led by the infectious, irresistible (or so I thought) single “Boyfriend.” And there have even been times in the past couple years when it seemed like Cosentino was practically courting animosity. The current state of the recording industry is dire enough that most fans understand that commercial crossovers are simply part of how performers build a fiscally viable career, but indulging something as crassly uncool as “designing” a clothing line for Urban Outfitters makes it seem like she’s angling to be the indie rock Britney.

It’s still been surprising to me at the level of venom deployed in several of the articles leading up to the release of their sophomore effort The Only Place. Everyone from L.A. Weekly to The A.V. Club has made a point of gleefully cataloging the most bruising assessments of Cosentino and Best Coast, including one writer who purported to measure Cosentino’s brain power against that of Sarah Palin, unkindly declaring the hockey mama grizzly (or whatever the hell she’s calling herself these days) the victor. It’s pretty early in the band’s life cycle for the hype machine to have turned this sour.

Knowing all this adds an interesting subtext to the songs on The Only Place. “Why I Cry” can easily be read as just another tale of dashed romance, a topic Cosentino is accused of writing about with damning frequency, which is a charge that can be leveled at about half the songwriters who drew paychecks banging out songs now recognized as classics. The song can also be heard as a petulant retaliation against her critics: “‘Yeah, you seem to think you know everything/ You don’t know why I cry.” Similarly, “How They Want Me to Be,” pairs lyrics about brave individuality in the face of brutal judgment with a summer sunset melody right out of the Brian Wilson playbook. “All of my friends stick up their noses/ They ask me where my money is and where does it go once I’ve spent it,” Cosentino sings. Eventually the song reaches its conclusion with her taking solace in a lover who also doesn’t want her to change to suit the others, itself a layered retort to those who gripe that she spends too much time gushing about her desire for love.

The album is instantly recognizable as a Best Coast effort, awash in surf rock rhythms and propped up by punchy hooks. Multi-instrumentalist Bobb Bruno grounds the songs with clean, crisp backing and Cosentino’s vocals float softly above it all. The band worked with producer Jon Brion, who characteristically coaxes an understated lushness onto the tracks. It’s still fuzzy, echoing and lo-fi, but it’s also got a fine sheen that’s surprisingly immaculate. There are even times when the band is clearly racing to free themselves of the ruts they could easily get into. “Better Girl” and “Let’s Go Home” have just enough of an earthy quality that they almost sound like the sort of songs Neko Case comes up with when she’s just trying to conjure a little lark for whatever hootenanny she might stumble upon.

Maybe I should be more jaded when I listen to The Only Place, taking grave offense at the directness, even the simplicity of the lyrics, but I don’t actually think that everyone needs to aspire to the arch poetry of Leonard Cohen or the battered barrio operettas of Tom Waits. Sometimes the gratifying immediacy of the best pop songs comes from the creator laying it all out there in the plainest way they can. That Best Coast can do it and generate a sort of melancholy beauty strikes me as worthy of appreciation rather than derision.

Here We Go Magic’s A Different Ship opens with an intro that sounds like a reverb pedal hooked up to Tom Waits’ garage, with percussive clanging leading into the simple major-key acoustic strum of “Hard To Be Close.” It’s a disjointed introduction linking two of the album’s simplest but most disparate moments. Then, when the 0:58 mark hits, ears perk. Wait, what is it about that tone of the guitars, gliding over those tense, tightly-wound rhythms? Who is it we’re listening to again?

It’s at that moment when A Different Ship becomes delicately complicated for its remaining 40 minutes, like finding out your new beau is on a break from a 15-year relationship with a much older, cooler fellow. Yes, the subtle musical magician Nigel Godrich’s fingers are all over this one, and his work here presents quite the paradox. With influences vibrant and varied, a humbly neurotic approach to mood-building, and an expert ability to lock down a groove, Here We Go Magic were approaching something close to perfection on Pigeons, but Nigel Godrich has uniquely neutered and complicated that magic within every minute of every song on the album. Alternately stated, Thom Yorke and his ponytail are the 800-pound gorillas on this Ship.

Structurally, “Hard to Be Close” is relative to Pigeons, looping a simple melody or two with chattering background voices that echo Temple’s growing angst. But Godrich’s techniques – the drums with no room to breathe, the panned guitar jazz ping-pong, subterranean, aquatic bass – make for a large, balding British monkey on these normally freewheeling Brooklynites. Granted, they have always favored a staid groove and subtle atmospherics over, say, a noisy guitar freak-out or pitch-shifted vocals (not comparing them to anyone in particular), and songs like “Over the Ocean” and “I Believe in Action” shine their strong points far. The latter song sums up the wrong kind of tension here, with a difficult melody floating through the gaps of a punchy guitar exercise. It’s an impressive composition, but all of the criss-crossing factions fizzle out before reaching any revelation.

The initial crashing chorus in “Make Up Your Mind” provides a mid-measure surprise, but instead of building off of it to grow toward a later, loftier peak, the structure repeats itself, adding in random synth warbles. A Different Ship encounters this issue throughout, with nary an appropriate climax or interesting structural progression in sight. It may be the first – or at least most obvious – record to be so heavily influenced by late-period Radiohead; even if the Godrich stamp was hidden, it’s hard not to hear songs like “Scatterbrain” and “A Punch-Up at a Wedding” lurking underneath melodic lurches like “Alone But Moving” and “Over the Ocean.” But when a frenetic song like “How Do I Know” should explode into a showstopper, a barnburner, a “2+2=5″ or “There There,” it again drowns in a series of Godrich’s in-and-out aural distractions.

A Different Ship is not by any means a chore to get through – it’s a mildly salty but enjoyable play, and as you might suspect by this point in the review – there are some undeniable grooves. But the push and pull of Godrich’s old habits (that work wonders on other songwriters) are just not a fit match for Here We Go Magic. “Nobody wants to sit in the middle,” sings Temple in “I Believe in Action,” but after the game of tug-of-war that’s taken place on A Different Ship, that’s exactly where they’ve landed.

Comedy is a genre of diminishing returns, where anything that was fertile ground once isn’t necessarily always so. Sacha Baron Cohen knows this better than most, as his rise to comedic stardom initially saw the actor-writer struggling to transfer his television success to the big screen. Fresh off “Da Ali G Show,” Baron Cohen’s first major film project was Ali G Indahouse, a straightforward fish-out-of-water comedy that took Baron Cohen’s first breakout character away from the interview arena that made him famous and instead attempted to force him into a narrative comedy structure he had no business in. Baron Cohen was only able to become a star by learning from that early misstep, building vehicles for two lesser known “Da Ali G Show” characters that emphasized their strengths: Borat got his own tour of America, Brüno got to force himself on Americans in the most obnoxious way possible. So why then is Baron Cohen returning to that scorched earth of his debut with The Dictator?

Part of the explanation is likely because Baron Cohen failed at a straightforward fish-out-of-water comedy and wants another go. That theory is backed up by Baron Cohen’s decision to create an entirely new character, Haffaz Aladeen, an amalgamation of any number of newsworthy dictators. Aladeen is the semi-benevolent ruler of the fictional Mideastern country Waadeya. He thinks he rules his country with an iron fist but is unaware that he’s mostly a laughing stock. That obliviousness is where Baron Cohen draws most of the comedy from and where the narrative gets its thrust, as Aladeen’s uncle Tamir (Ben Kingsley) instigates a coup and replaces Aladeen with an idiot lookalike who can be more easily controlled. But things of course go awry after Tamir leaves Aladeen’s fate in the hands of a racist torturer played by John C. Reilly, who gets too caught up in the inferiority of his torture equipment and allows Aladeen to escape.

What follows is something more ambitious than Ali G Indahouse but equally wrongheaded. Baron Cohen does his best to merge the formula of his last two films (offensive real life stereotype squares off against real life offensive Americans) with more typical Hollywood filmmaking, dropping the mockumentary angle in favor of a three-act arc, complete with romance and redemption. That means that all of the danger of Baron Cohen’s previous two works is gone, leaving only a neutered, overly scripted structure that feels dated the instant it’s been viewed. Baron Cohen is left to make danger out of gags rather than situations, lazily attempting to push the envelope of stale 9/11 jokes and cultural awkwardness. Almost everything you will find funny about this film is already available for viewing via trailers, save for one extended gag involving a decapitated head.

What’s worse is that the character of Aladeen himself feels less than half-formed, functioning like some kind of global Borat with infinite resources and even less intelligence. Aladeen is presented as a simpleton when that’s convenient and as an incredibly sharp, charismatic leader when that’s called for, and the odd romantic angle Baron Cohen crafts between the world leader pretend and blandly stereotypical hipster hippie chick Zoey (Anna Faris) only emphasizes the lack of characterization. Zoey is a mess of anti-feminist stereotypes and an odd target for Baron Cohen, which is perhaps why her depiction is so difficult to understand. We’re expected to believe that she’s a hardline, militant vegan and political activist who runs a co-op for political refugees but is somehow clueless to Aladeen’s true self. She brushes off his aggressive behavior and demeaning antics and eventually even falls in love with him, seemingly in an effort to prove that what any good feminist needs is a big, abrasive man to put her in her place. The mockumentary form gave Baron Cohen’s subjects an undeniable air of reality, since their reactions were meant to appear completely organic and unstaged, and without that armor, Baron Cohen’s targets merely come across as strawmen.

Although it’s easy to build up a defense of “this is just a comedy,” and therefore the only important thing is whether or not it’s funny, The Dictator fails in that regard too, offering far fewer laughs than Borat or Brüno and nearly no comparable insight. The Dictator’s only truly effective moment comes towards the end, when Baron Cohen builds up the punchline of the entire film with an epic speech about the differences between Aladeen’s form of dictatorship and our form of “democracy.” But it’s not enough to justify the rest of the film, no matter how good its intentions or how admirable Baron Cohen’s attempts at breaking out of his box are.

It’s been a great year so far for post-hardcore and punk bands, with a vast offering of heavy, sludgy, distorted garage rock to pick from and all of it surprisingly consistent and refreshing. From Screaming Females and the Men to Cloud Nothings and Ceremony, fans of feedback, guitar solos and frantic kit work must be salivating with every new release. While loud, guitar-driven music has certainly never gone away, during the latter half of the aughts and the early part of this decade the indie world did shift its praise from the garage rock revival of the Strokes, Hives and White Stripes to the dreamy bedroom productions of artists such as Beach House, Neon Indian and Washed Out. That’s why 2012 feels like a breath of fresh air; of cleaning out the bedroom, brushing the dust off that Fender and stomping that distortion pedal. And with the recent reissue of Mclusky’s criminally underheard Mclusky Do Dallas on vinyl, 2012 just got a whole lot louder.

There’s no mistaking Do Dallas for anything other than in-your-face punk rock. With song titles such as “Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues,” “Fuck This Band,” “To Hell with Good Intentions” and an album title that references a porno, Mclusky are nothing if not honest about their musical objectives. Though those song titles could signal puffed-chest bravado, Mclusky have the chops to back up their punk rock proclamations, and the resulting record remains one of the best of the aughts. Opener “Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues” kicks off with flurried hi-hats, heavily distorted guitars and the raspy, whacked-out vocals of Andrew Falkous – Kurt Cobain and Black Francis are crooners in comparison to his vocal hysteria. “I’m fearful, I’m fearful, I’m fearful of flying/ And flying is fearful of me,” he shrieks, one of the numerous one-line gems peppered throughout this record. “No New Wave No Fun” swirls with little regard for a melodic centre, the guitar solos trying to keep up with Falkous’ unpredictable dips and dives. While these opening tracks hint at pure chaos, anarchy and complete ignorance of things like rhythm, clarity and melody, Do Dallas is hardly an inaccessible record. It’s heavy, aggressive, foul-mouthed and angry, but it’s also packed with earworm-y hooks and a killer sense of humor.

Falkous flaunts this humor on “Fuck This Band,” a laidback Pavement-esque jam that revels in the anticipation of critical reception. Over a slinky bass line, Falkous sings, “Fuck this band/ Because they swear too much/ It’s an obvious ploy/ And irresponsible,” a winking moment of awareness. “To Hell with Good Intentions” is all fire and brimstone, an impossibly overdriven bass line overwhelming the repetitious lead guitar that one can imagine would make an appropriate soundtrack for the descent into Hell. While Falkous’ sporadic, idiosyncratic shriek is the often the star of each track, he never overpowers the arrangement, always leaving room for the stellar, churning bass lines provided by Jonathan Chapple and the punishing kit work of Matthew Harding. Do Dallas is a collaborative effort through and through, presenting each member firing on all cylinders and maturing into a tight, focused and hungry band.

While Do Dallas works best as a whole, as a 34 minute blaze of kick drums, screams and fuzz, there are tracks here that work as singles, as (relatively) accessible entries into the work of Mclusky. The off-kilter rhythm and dissonance of “Collagen Rock” is immediately infectious, an apt thesis statement for the record and for the indie rock tradition the Welsh band rose out of. While “Collagen Rock” is noteworthy for its brandishing and subverting of influences, Mclusky may never have written a better song than “Alan Is a Cowboy Killer,” which employs a simple, sparse, two-note bass line during the verses, constructing a steady dose of feedback before exploding into a manic chorus of shredded guitars and cymbal crashes. The tension-catharsis dichotomy is employed perfectly here and provides the most memorable, cathartic moment right near the album’s end.

To this day, Do Dallas remains a monumental album. It may not be the most revolutionary revision of the punk rock aesthetic or vision, but it’s definitely the most fun. There’s a perfect balance present on the record; Mclusky is focused on creating a foreboding, harsh, loud record, but never once take themselves too seriously. The overdriven guitar solos and Falkous’ shriek hit you like a freight train, but are never alienating or unwanted. There’s no overarching political or creative statement, just three guys beating the shit out of their instruments and having a blast doing it. You can’t ask for much more from one of the definitive records of the 2000s.