Archers of Loaf were courted by at least one major label in 1995 after the release of Vee Vee, the band’s sophomore full length and their most commercially successful album to date. To a certain extent it makes sense that a major would have found Vee Vee attractive, as a few of its songs would have fit in well with the alt-rock mindset that defined the mid 1990s. This pursuit would ultimately become little more than a curious piece in the band’s history though: the Archers remained with Alias Records, and their involvement with a major would be limited to a distribution deal with Elektra for their third LP, 1996’s All the Nation’s Airports.

After listening to Merge’s incredible reissue of Vee Vee, it seems even more surprising that a big bucks label came knocking at all. With their uneasy mix of melody and guitar-bass-drums rock noise, coupled with oblique/evasive/insightful/incomprehensible lyrics and Eric Bachmann’s rough vocals, the Archers were never really mainstream material, even for an audience that had been eased into various distillations of indie rock via Nirvana and other lesser bands. Indeed, for every radio-friendly song like “Underdogs of Nipomo” or “Floating Friends,” there were far more songs a la “The Worst Has Yet to Come” and “Nostalgia:” short, aggravated blasts of tension and nastiness too coarse for FM consumption.

Vee Vee has typically been viewed as an abstract indie rock record about the state of modern music, particularly in songs like “Nevermind the Enemy,” “Greatest of All Time,” “Fabricoh” and “Let the Loser Melt.” With mentions of drowned musicians and earlobes tacked to radios and lyrics like “the underground is overcrowded” – likely the most quoted Bachmann lyric – it’s easy to see why, but this depiction shortchanges the album. “Harnessed in Slums” is the closest the band came to an anthem, a propulsive burst of aggression that, along with Icky Mettle’s “Web In Front,” is probably the best single the band did. Later the band upends the song’s violent streak in the album-closing “Underachievers March and Fight Song,” whose whistles and buoyant vibe might possibly make it the most non-threatening call to arms ever. Elsewhere, references to crime, murder, sex, drugs and death are scattered liberally, most pointedly in “Death in the Park,” resulting in an album whose subject matter extends far beyond that of the insular music world.

At the time they were sometimes (unfairly) derided as a junior version of Pavement, but in hindsight what Bachmann, Eric Johnson, Matt Gentling and Mark Price produced in the 1990s now stands as some of the most enduring music any band from that era mustered. Rounded out with a bonus disc that includes singles and a nice number of lo-fi demos, with fresh perspective Vee Vee actually sounds the equal of Icky Mettle and should further cement the band’s bona fides. The band’s recent reunion has afforded Archers of Loaf the obligatory rounds of applause they didn’t always get the first time around, and for both fans and newcomers alike, Merge’s latest reissue comes highly recommended. Created in a period when large piles of then-masterpieces today sound hopelessly irrelevant and forever shackled to a specific time and place, Vee Vee’s shelf life appears to be limitless.

Welcome to PLAYLIST. The idea is simple enough: make a playlist (with mix tapes and CDs becoming so unfortunately passé) centered around one artist or band with a deep catalog. There is only one parameter, however. Our charge is to limit our playlist to just one song per album per discography. This time around we decided to pick the best of Lambchop. It wasn’t easy.

So once again, we got together, butted heads and hashed out this list. We hope it not only motivates you to dig into your Lambchop collection again, but to come up with your own lists or an impetus to check this great band out for the first time! PLAYLIST will be a recurring feature here on Spectrum Culture, so please tune in, check them out and share your thoughts. Enjoy! - David Harris

“Moody Fucker” from Nine/Moody Fucker 7″ (1993)

There are fuckers all over the Lambchop catalog, whether it’s the little fuckers of “Smuckers” or in this case, the moody fucker from the song of the same name. And Tools in the Dryer, which includes the band’s Nine/Moody Fucker 7″, is a fucker in its own right: consisting of various B-sides, remixes, live songs, demos and other curiosities from 1987 to 2000, the album is a strong contender for the band’s least essential album (yes, even more so than Co-Lab). Indeed, picking a best song from this one was difficult, as much of Tools hasn’t aged particularly well. That might sound like an out-of-place comment for a feature whose purpose is to celebrate a band’s catalog, but Tools is for diehard fans only. And not too many of them, I’d argue.

So the nod goes to “Moody Fucker,” though the band’s cover of Vic Chesnutt’s “Miss Prissy” runs a close second. Despite its lullaby-worthy arrangement and smoky horns, the song is anything but soothing. Wagner’s unapologetically blunt lyrics serve the song well, as lines like “I don’t want to cry no more/ How ’bout you” and “Now I’m pounding on the brink/ To be a moody fucker” can be read as mocking, insulting or just maybe a little bit remorseful. It also doesn’t succumb to the excess of the lounge-music style that the band has occasionally embraced too affectionately throughout their albums. “Moody Fucker” is a diamond mixed in among a pile of shit, to be sure, but with any band as prolific as Lambchop, that type of thing is probably inevitable but also entirely forgivable. - Eric Dennis

“Soaky in the Pooper” from I Hope You’re Sitting Down/Jack’s Tulips (1994)

This blurb will be the first and last time you see the nickname “Nashville’s most fucked-up country band” in this feature. Though Lambchop may have outlived that moniker, the band’s debut record I Hope You’re Sitting Down/Jack’s Tulips (1994) on Merge (the label they still use today) does not sound like a country record at all. Rather, the songs of bespectacled singer Kurt Wagner feature a mélange of post-modernist mumblings and something more Americana than the other shit we called country circa the mid-’90s. Wagner could be the Woody Allen of indie music as many of his songs touch on the morose with a knowing wryness. Take the album’s best song: “Soaky in the Pooper.” As an opening salvo, you can’t get much better than a suicide in the bathroom. Opening with gentle, arpeggiated guitars and deep, funereal brass, Wagner chronicles the desperate demise of some guy who decides to drown himself in the toilet. Yet, because the song is so delicate and hushed it’s more tragic than funny, even if Wagner does rhyme “bluish” with “Jewish.” “You’re never lonely when you’re dead,” the deceased once said before he takes his final plunge. Let’s hope that’s the truth. - David Harris

“All Smiles and Mariachi” from How I Quit Smoking (1996)

What’s exactly going on in “All Smiles and Mariachi?” Hell if I know, and Kurt Wagner’s not saying either, as the vocalist over the years has revealed details about his songs only sparingly. Whatever its chain of events, the narrator clearly isn’t enjoying his present situation, as he tunes his dinner companion out for over 20 minutes, spending the majority of his time, in a line that never ceases to make me chuckle, “Nodding and eating most of the chips.” The narrator also drops something off at a house (who the hell knows what), scores donuts afterwards in a fit of euphoria and is happy to find his “services no longer required,” whatever those were. It’s like listening to a story from a drunkard or small child, only this is a story that never grows stale.

I might have boycotted this playlist – or at least made life hell for Spectrum Culture’s editor-in-chief – had “All Smiles and Mariachi” not made the cut. Along with “Suzieju” and, in a pinch, “We Never Argue,” it’s one of the defining tracks on How I Quit Smoking, the band’s 1996 sophomore and, arguably, best album. It contains everything great about early Lambchop: a skewed instrumental take on country music, quirky humor and abstract lyrics that could be read as poetic gibberish, deeply philosophical or maybe a little bit of both. Wagner’s cadence and pacing are flawless, while the horns that close the song give it some added Mexicali flavor. All these pieces add up to a song that, while mostly incomprehensible, encapsulates why so many fans consider How I Quit Smoking the band’s first masterpiece. - Eric Dennis

“I’m a Stranger Here” from Hank (1996)

“I’m a Stranger Here” is one of those pleasantly fucked-up Lambchop moments that makes me wonder whether I should feel like I’m cloud surfing or dirt diving. Judging by the lyrics that begin the beautifully morose opener of the downtrodden-deadbeat-down-in-the-dumps Hank EP, it’s probably the latter. “Ain’t it hard to stumble when you got no place to fall/ In this whole wide world, yes I’ve got no place at all/ ‘Cause I’m a stranger here/ I’m a stranger everywhere,” Kurt Wagner sings in Lambchop’s version of this traditional song, evoking the old-fashioned country sentiments that characterize this seven-song EP.

Plenty of musicians have tackled this song that explores the woes of a lonesome loser with no home and little hope, but damn, rarely has this melancholy ballad sounded so beautiful. Backed by a mega-mellow blend of weepy guitars and percussion, Wagner’s world-weary voice almost quivers to the point of fading into cowboy oblivion, even as he delivers characteristically unorthodox (and borderline psychedelic) lyrics about saddling his black bear and finding a fair deal in this world somewhere. On a record that’s unabashedly gloomy, “I’m a Stanger Here” is both elegiac and buoyant, the kind of Lambchop tune that hooks you with its silky arrangements even while the song’s lyrics make you want to drown your sorrows on your favorite barstool in the local saloon. It may not cheer you up exactly, but good luck walking away from it. - Marcus David

“Your Fucking Sunny Day” from Thriller (1997)

The high point for energy, joy and sheer incomprehensibility on Michael Jackson’s Thriller is opener “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin,’” one of those great tracks that, while ostensibly about something, is better enjoyed as a mindless stream of delirious babble. The equivalent on Lambchop’s Thriller has to be “Your Fucking Sunny Day,” which, aside from the title’s bad manners, may be the album’s most genial and carefree track. It’s not exactly mindless, but the jaunty delivery and driving horns contribute to a theme of words as window dressing, hinting more at mood and tone than exact expression. We get references to sprinklers, wind and the aforementioned sun, off-hand indicators of summer and warmth that mostly tie into the brass and vocal riffing that propel the song.

Sandwiched between a low-key burble with a gruff title (“My Face Your Ass,” which repeatedly threatens “I’ll show your punk rock ass“) and a propulsive, slide-guitar heavy romp (“Hey Where’s Your Girl?”), “Your Fucking Sunny Day” feels like a game changer, pulling the band to exceptional heights of unadulterated whimsy. Wagner is in equally rare form, opening with a blissful yelp, tossing ironic humor and wacky line-endings onto words that become increasingly oblique as the song progresses. Much of the rhyme work, especially the fitful be/see/need/agree scheme, feels like nonsense, but it’s nonsense that’s right at home in a song whose lyrical vacuity is spun into gold. - Jesse Cataldo

“The Saturday Option” from What Another Man Spills (1998)

For the first chapter of Lambchop’s career, they played the part of a deliriously offbeat Nashville outfit, whose country arrangements were often so precise and pretty when coupled with Kurt Wagner’s unmistakably bizarre vocal styling and lyrics that the results bordered on derangement. Then came What Another Man Spills in 1998 and the beginning of a new, more confounding, chapter. The album weaved elements of jazz, soul and funk nakedly into its hazy forefront rather than just hinting at them as the band did in the past. The collective even covered songs by the likes of Curtis Mayfield, Frederick Knight and more left-field acts like James McNew’s Dump. What Another Man Spills wasn’t some simple genre exercise though – the album would be the jumping-off point for the next decade of Lambchop albums.

“The Saturday Option” was and still is a prime reminder that, no matter how many members are in Lambchop or what genres they’re currently fixated on, Wagner’s knack for turning a phrase will always be what catapults their music into such a welcome bizarro-world. Here you’ll find Wagner tossing around the singular form of buttocks, rhyming it with “rumpus,” mixing bleach with apricot and repeatedly doing some sort of shabby thing. But as the song lilts along from its merry-go-round country beginning, the ease and sincerity of his words become more and more evident; he’s not overthinking scenarios and ideas with the type of pretension that David Berman is often associated with, and he’s not trying to just use silly words, and he’s instead using the absolute right words for his mindset. Who knows what separating wood from screws and beef from stew has to do with doing shabby things, but with the amount of dry soul emanating from Wagner and his merry band, who gives a damn? - Kyle Wall

“Grumpus” from Nixon (2000)

Nixon is an odd record and certainly not Lambchop’s best. Nevertheless, it wasn’t so much a mid-career slump as a more defined journey into the band’s penchant for the Sound of Philadelphia’s darker soul undercurrents. Philly Soul’s stylistic tropes are painted in broad musical swaths across Nixon, from the smoothly ruddy horns of “The Old Gold Shoe” to the whooping falsetto vocals of “You Masculine You” and the sunny “What Else Could It Be?” Nixon also could be billed as a concept album – taking its name from the former President – though it’s best served as a sonic diversion versus a thematic one. Lambchop included more soul tracks than country, trading warbling guitar for rushes of ’70s-era TV licks and lush string accents.

“Grumpus” is arguably the funkiest of Kurt Wagner’s velvet-covered pimp-walk through alarmingly smooth Philly soul. Even though Lambchop had more than proven their experimental mettle over the years, “Grumpus” comes as a second-track surprise; those bendy guitar filters and half-buried gusts of baritone sax seem to hail from a very different time and place than much of the band’s prior discography. But that surprise is a pleasant one. Lambchop’s musicians have proven themselves to think profoundly outside of the traditional country box ­ and it’s in that bizarre musical place their recordings are truly special. - Michael Merline

“I Can Hardly Spell My Name” from Is a Woman (2002)


Is a Woman is still perhaps Lambchop’s most polarizing record. A love-it-or-hate-it offering that found Wagner et al. forgoing the lavish instrumentation of previous album Nixon for a minimalist sound so subdued it bordered on funereal, the record marked- depending on whom you sided with- either a natural artistic progression or a descent into musical manic depression.

Like the rest of the album (and much of the Lambchop catalog), “I Can Hardly Spell My Name” features Wagner’s distinct sing-speak placed along lyrical ambiguities like, “A Siamese is lonely also/ And I’ve been waiting all my life/ In spite of this arrangement/ Moderation on vacation/ It’s time we all settled down.” Your guess is as good as mine as to what such open-ended poetics might actually mean.

But even while the lyrics remain shrouded in uncertainty, the song’s emotional effect is undeniable. Hopelessly sad and achingly gorgeous, the song has a nearly cherubic quality, driven home by its mournful and jazzy arrangement and the angelic na-na-nas that echo throughout the chorus. “This may not appeal to you/ But I can hardly spell my name,” Wagner practically whispers at one point, but he couldn’t be more wrong. Few Lambchop tunes have ever appealed to us more. -Marcus David

“The Gettysburg Address” from Treasure Chest of the Enemy (2002)

It’s worth remembering that Abraham Lincoln reportedly considered his Gettysburg address a failure and was prone to bouts of intense introspection throughout his life. It’s a character trait the protagonist of “Gettysburg Address” would likely appreciate. Appearing first on the tour-only CD-R Treasure Chest of the Enemy and again on 2006′s odds-and-ends collection The Decline of Country and Western Civilization, Pt. 2, “Gettysburg Address” is defined by similar strands of self-doubt and brooding. Whatever historical parallels a listener might try to find here, the song works just as well on a contemporary level, as Wagner provides the type of little lyrical details – hacked-up phlegm, full ashtrays and a sad-sack guy taking out the trash and unable to keep the days straight – that are the hallmarks of a master storyteller.

Built around an opening guitar and piano arrangement and a middle section that adds pedal steel and strings, the song also features some of Wagner’s most assured and clearly enunciated vocals. Anyone who complains that all Wagner does is croak and mumble should listen to this one, as his singing here is confident, especially in the song’s last verse. “Gettysburg Address” can be read in various ways, whether as a song rooted in American history, a song about the creative process and how a work of art is viewed by its author vs. the public or just as a simple lament about someone’s more desperate moments when one’s flaws are magnified and the personal becomes almost unbearably public. - Eric Dennis

“Steve McQueen” from Aw C’mon (2004)

For a band so adept at restlessly changing styles, Lambchop always seems able to nail quiet contemplation just as easily, even managing to imbue that tranquility with a little bit of their signature cheek. “Steve McQueen” has all the things you’d want out of this kind of song: wispy but pronounced strings, scattered clarion piano and little shreds of guitar, each briefly stepping to the fore before descending back to the bottom of the mix. All these elements serve as the stuffing for a consummately mature song, the kind of effortless late career exercise that Aw C’mon excels in. Kurt Wagner’s voice, which he’s developed as a great diverse instrument despite a lack of pure skill, ends up showing even more when it’s not being wrenched around. “Steve McQueen” gains from this vocal stability, choking all kinds of subtle emotion from the barebones reading of the lyrics, which say a lot through very little, most notably the softly heartbreaking “make sure we never/ Ever stand in each other’s way” that begins the last stanza. Like the rest of the album, it employs a 14-piece orchestra, which allows for a full, lush sound that still pays close attention to its individual parts, like the delicately plinking piano that lights up the song’s bridge. - Jesse Cataldo

“There’s Still Time” from No, You C’mon (2004)

As the equally consistent answer to sister-album Aw, C’mon, No,You C’mon is one of Lambchop’s more rewarding releases. The songs rate strangely even; the dynamics and song-to-song contrasts are there, but few tracks stand out as highlights; that quality is balanced – and generally outweighed by a complete lack of unworthy offerings. Both Aw and No, You C’mon are really a testament to Lambchop’s last decade of productivity.

“There’s Still Time” is a sedate ballad initially flush with strings, harmony vocals and gentle hits of the snare. Wagner’s mumbling delivery sits at a particularly low register and feels strangely sinister, and darkly cryptic lyrics don’t suggest that affect is just a vocal curiosity. Halfway through the track the lush orchestral swoons give away to a tension-filled sound, those same violins striking like daggers and fluttering nervously. Wagner’s voice begins to echo as he chants a gravely mantra of “Cover the floor/ Same as before” and the tune slowly fades to a unresolved finish. Here Lambchop plays competing elements off each other until those contrasts take on a formidable gravity, the track’s momentum relying on that combined effect that would be absent otherwise. That moment when the final refrain drops takes your stomach with it. Only a 13-piece band with such a extensive songwriting portfolio could make that bait-and-switch setup work to such great effect. - Michael Merline

“Prepared” from CoLAB (2005)

Lambchop going electronic is kind of like Perry Como singing death metal or the Three Tenors releasing a hip-hop record. It’s just plain weird, and though it’s been five years since the band teamed with electro whiz kids Hands Off Cuba to create CoLab, Lambchop fans may still be scratching their heads and wondering if the four-song EP was a serious attempt by the band to shed their lingering alt-country typecasting in favor of a bold new musical adventure or just an oddball practical joke.

In any case, it didn’t take long for the Spectrum Culture staff to agree that the standout track on this experimental EP is, well, the only song not polluted by blips, beeps and supersonic sound effects. It may be the victor by default, but “Prepared” would have been a contender for paramount track on just about any Lambchop record. Like so many other Wagner tunes, the song combines a mawkish but enchanting string and piano arrangement with lyrics whose meanings rest in the ear of the beholder. Cryptic lines like, “Voices cried in silence or crept stealthily away/ Left shimmering with rigid lips compressed” mix with (gasp!) nearly lovestruck sentiments like, “We are thrown out of our bedclothes/ Instead of slumbering away/ And a smile spreads like a sunbeam through your face” to create one of those delightfully ambiguous Lambchop tunes that both confuses and enchants. Throw in a grateful absence of awkward techno and “Prepared” stands as the runaway pick for the best track on perhaps the band’s most brain-bubbling record. - Marcus David

“Paperback Bible” from Damaged (2006)

By the time Damaged appeared in 2006, Lambchop had shed numerous subtle identities. After the band’s “difficult” stab at Prince-flavored rock in 2000 with Nixon, the one-two punch of Aw C’mon and No, You C’mon in 2004 and the strange experimentalism with electronica group Hands off Cuba for the CoLab EP, Damaged found Wagner returning to the obscure, stately songs that the band built its reputation on. Opening track, “Paperback Bible,” not only sets the tone for this intricate and quiet record, but stands out as its best track. Stretching for almost eight minutes, “Paperback Bible” once again features Wagner’s dense, murky ruminations that may seem little more than stream-of-conscious ramblings. However, looking for literal translation here is the wrong path to follow. Rather, as he lists the numerous things he’d like to buy, such as “a four month old rat terrier pup,” Wagner is creating a sensory world filled with specific objects that have lost their specific usage. However, by the end of the song, Wagner no longer wants to buy that “good, used paperbacked, living Bible,” but sell it. Somewhere between prom dresses and hand guns, something changes. Rumor has it that Wagner took the lyrics from the used items for sale on the back of newspapers, but deciphering what it is just really isn’t that important. - David Harris

“National Talk Like a Pirate Day” from OH(Ohio) (2009)

In a 2008 interview with NPR, Kurt Wagner delved into the inner workings of his songwriting and provided the host with an unusually telling anecdote. While trying to write “a folk song that is impossible to sing along to,” Wagner’s wife called to inform him that it was “National Talk Like a Pirate Day.” As he spoke with her, he noticed a picture of her right above his workspace, with her holding a record player and a little hockey game right behind her on the table. The song turned into one about his wife, that holiday, but more specifically, that moment.

That’s not to say Wagner’s initial goal wasn’t reached; its wordy webs of surrealist phrases (“It’s opinions disarrayed of might are drooped“) and situations (comparing a boy who forgets to shave to a girl who tames her dog) make for a fast-paced folk song that is incredibly difficult to sing along to or decipher. Wagner’s admission that the song was a result of allowing things outside of his brain to “be a part of the song itself” doesn’t cheapen its meaning but makes the listener step back and appreciate the true talent for words and images he possesses. By song’s end, there are – or at least seem to be – references to politics, education, romance, performing music and death, and the narrator’s viewpoint seems to juggle between Wagoner and his wife.

The song moves quicker than most in Lambchop’s catalog and compared with many of their jazz-leaning compositions, “National Talk Like a Pirate Day” is a pretty simple folk song; if it had a steady chorus and dumbed-down lyrics it could’ve maybe emerged as a crossover hit of some sort. But Wagner has no interest in any of that. Like other pillars of the vast Lambchop catalog, the balance of biting wit, dry humor and sweet sincerity, sometimes all at once in a line like, “It’s a wonder you can disregard at all,” takes “National Talk Like a Pirate Day” to the top of OH (Ohio). - Kyle Wall

“Gone Tomorrow” from Mr. M (2012)

Mr. M finds Lambchop’s methods growing increasingly complex, straying further from Kurt Wagner’s country roots into the realms of big-band jazz and sweeping strings, but the prevailing style is still concrete, and a big, swaying track like “Gone Tomorrow” sums it up perfectly. The song is consistently smart, a tad sentimental, and quietly daring, not least for the way it’s split into two discrete halves. This is key because Wagner, while a as poetic and imaginative a songwriter as ever, seems more and more concerned with the musical component beyond his words. By separating those lyrical and musical concerns “Gone Tomorrow” becomes two songs bundled together. The first is a piano-tinged reminisce, full of odd but tactile language (“the wine tasted like sunshine in basement”). This goes on for about three minutes, developing along with an increasingly blustery string progression, before the words drop out. Here the track undergoes an odd transformation, transitioning to an instrumental section that threatens a close but keeps rolling on. After two minutes there’s another distinct change, with the instruments settling into a hypnotic, repetitive raga. By the time it finally ends, near the seven minute mark, the song has demonstrably transformed several times, ending up somewhere completely opposite but also expressively similar to where it began, again highlighting the wit and wonder of Wagner’s work, which remains both lyrically and musically explorative. -Jesse Cataldo

In the new comic thriller Thin Ice, Greg Kinnear plays a Wisconsin insurance salesman named Mickey Prohaska. He’s introduced as a fairly hapless soul, easily duped at a conference into a hotel room tryst clearly intended first and foremost as a means to part him from his wallet. Fidgety and casually duplicitous, he’s someone who’s abandoned any notions of extricating himself from his middlebrow misery through the long, slow trod of conventional means and is on the hunt for whatever minor angles he can play to free him of the frigid toil of his Upper Midwest existence. He’s perfectly suited for a tricky long con. The only question is: which side of it will he be on?

The third film from director Jill Sprecher is a perfectly suitable example of neo-noir. There’s an easily understandable insurance scam, a slew of colorful characters developed with unpredictability as a hallmark and a tantalizing fiscal payoff that escalates in size as the film progress. There’s even a handy MacGuffin in the form of a scuffed violin that Mickey stumbles upon in the dilapidated farmhouse home of a cranky loner, only to discover that it’s one of those hidden treasures that keeps hopeful hoarders lining up for “Antiques Roadshow” auditions. The cranky loner is named Gorvy (played with a thick “hoo Jheez, you betcha” accent by Alan Arkin) and he’s naïve enough to think his new insurance policy means he can call the agent out to fix his broken television and cranky enough that separating him from his unexpectedly pricey instrument isn’t necessarily going to be easy.

Matters become more complicated when Mickey gets tangled up with a shady locksmith (Billy Crudup) who installs Gorvy’s new security system, bringing another person into the mix who helps set Mickey’s already faulty moral compass spinning out of control. Much of the film plays out with the loopy logic of a bicycle assembled by a blindfolded drunkard. Things come together only to rapidly fall apart, and one of the film’s key pleasures is watching Kinnear’s slow burn anxiety as he stands baffled before the mess he’s made. Alfred Hitchcock used to love dropping an everyman into incredibly complicated circumstances, but Joel and Ethan Coen figured out it’s sometimes more satisfying to see a guileless braggart in the same situation, with a little dose of comeuppance often in the mix. That’s the approach employed by Sprecher (who came up with the screenplay with her regular writing partner, her sister Karen) and Kinnear makes the ideal target.

The mechanics of a film like this are of the utmost importance, and that’s where Thin Ice both shines and stumbles. The intricacies of the whole plot largely stand up to scrutiny when they’re fully revealed at the end of the film, even as all the moving parts require a fairly strong suspension of disbelief over the way everything fell into place in a nearly ideal manner for the schemers. The ultimate payoffs to some of the earliest scenes would likely be a bit more satisfying if those set-ups weren’t such awkward brickwork in the flow of the film that they simply had to have more importance than was initially apparent.

Generally, though, Sprecher controls the flow and tone of the film with great care, knowing when to press the accelerator a little further to the floorboard to glide over the rough patches. It has some of the devious charm of her debut feature, Clockwatchers (1997) and none of the ponderousness that sunk her sophomore outing, Thirteen Conversations About One Thing (2001). It’s lithe and entertaining, plainly assured that any tangles will be taken care of by the end, when it will all pull together in a sturdy knot.

Robots have been gaining sentience and rising against their human creators for decades, at least within the realm of sci-fi. Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics (all centering on the notion that robots must never harm humans) have been routinely violated in the name of apocalyptic android entertainment. A.I.-induced doomsday scenarios have adapted especially well to the silver screen, whether it was HAL 9000 refusing to open the pod bay doors, the Terminator hunting down a mother and child or Agent Smith battling to ensure humans remain oblivious to the Matrix. The concept of our species creating and eventually ceding intellectual control to our own superior successors (a theoretical framework futurists have dubbed “singularity”) has saturated speculative fiction to the point of becoming trite. It also brings in the big bucks.

So it comes as no surprise that Steven Spielberg snared the movie rights to Daniel H. Wilson’s debut novel Robopocalypse before the book was even finished. After all, with a Ph.D. in robotics, Wilson literally wrote the (faux) guidebook on How to Survive a Robot Uprising, so one would hope that — with his first stab at fiction — he’d shed new light on the familiar ground of machines overthrowing their masters. Instead, Robopocalypse’s lone redeeming quality is that it should make for a seamless transition to celluloid considering that it’s comprised primarily of action sequences written as if they were a novelization of an already existing film. Wilson’s cinematic prose conjures vivid imagery, but comes off as cold and unfeeling as, well, a robot.

Wilson frames his novel as a series of mostly first person accounts about the rise of the malevolent machine mastermind Archos and his assault on humankind during “Zero Hour” and the ensuing “New War.” These chronicles are pieced together by Cormac “Bright Boy” Wallace from the black box that remains after Archos’ defeat in his radioactive arctic lair. Archos had been a tricky bastard, initially turning elevators into deathtraps, sicking heat-seeking smart cars on the general populace and transforming legions of helper robots into efficient battalions.

The members of the human resistance come from such varying backgrounds that they seem deliberately hodgepodge: there’s the Japanese engineer, the soldier in Afghanistan, the Native American sheriff, a deft computer hacker in London, the child of an American politician and even a “reborn” robot itself. Though only a few survive, all play crucial roles in the eventual defeat of Archos. Despite a fetishist’s focus on the specific builds and movements of the ever-evolving machines as they crush windpipes, tear off faces or burrow into flesh and detonate, Wilson’s characters speak as though their words originated from an assembly line. Dialogue is used almost exclusively for exposition or cliché (Archos’ doomed creator actually says, “My god, what have I done?”) and each first person account has the same penchant for unrealistically florid language and egregious overuse of the one-sentence paragraph. After all, what young child would say something like, “A wave of red-orange pulses radiate toward me.”

The chance of humans successfully overthrowing a viral villain who can turn something as benign as a toy doll against its owner seems remote, especially in this not-too-distant future where society relies on robotic assistance for everything from romantic companionship to warfare. As a result, Wilson keeps Archos’ motives oblique as the robot monster states that he could nuke the world if destruction was his only aim. But Wilson largely ignores other modes of death at Archos’ disposal, namely the world’s aircraft and military technology. A few planes drop from the sky during Zero Hour, but throughout much of the war a patch of rough terrain proves sufficient enough to keep the robots at bay.

The action sequences are admittedly vivid. They’re engaging in the same way as a Michael Bay film, reliant on flash and noise and creatively violent scenarios. The human characters themselves rarely exhibit much humanity. Absent are the inherent confusion and panic that would grip people in a robot apocalypse. Everyone is far too analytic and able to comprehend the machinations of the apocalypse even as the sky is falling. There’s no shock, no doubt, no internal conflicts. There are no emotional connections or even anyone to root for. And given that we know the war’s result from the outset, there’s no real tension. We’ll have to wait until 2013 to see how many tens of millions Robopocalypse manages to rake in at the box office, but for now we know the novel is a clunker.

From its colorful, tropical fish flying through a nebula beginnings to its laidback, shimmering closing track, Young Magic’s Melt is a trippy album. While it’s difficult to describe exactly what “chillwave” as a genre consists of, it’s easy to point out examples; Young Magic is most certainly one of them. The moniker belongs to one Isaac Emmanuel and various unnamed friends, Melt being the debut full length album after several scattered releases. Something like the opposite of Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, Melt was recorded over the course of a year while Emmanuel traveled the world, enlisting friends to contribute/borrow instruments from, and it comes off surprising cohesive as an album. But while it feels of a whole as a piece of music, it rarely feels like one that rises above a mellow, unfocused trip.

Again, what is chillwave? In short, I think it’d be fair to define it as psychedelic pop without the hooks. Melt focuses the grooves that makes chillwave dreamy and relaxing, but also adds an element of percussive force somewhat unusual for the genre. At times, the 11 tracks on the album sometimes even approach a very laidback kind of hip hop, albeit one that would lend itself more to imagery of prayer beads and peyote buttons than white lines and Tecs. It’s full of heavy, looming synthesizers, with repetitive, almost chugging beats mixed with handclaps and other, less identifiable percussive elements, so much that Emmanuel’s voice is often submerged and unrecognizable under it all. Which is a pity, as so many of the songs share similar elements that they begin to blend together (not wholly in a positive way); perhaps being able to parse out what he’s singing about would help, but until the inevitable remixes appear, we’ll never know.

While the sonic similarity of many of the tracks does make Melt flow in a pleasingly organic fashion, it does make it difficult to care about most of the songs here. They share similar time signatures and all are swathed in a corona of hazy synthesizers and vague choral vocals, making the few tracks that stand out that much remarkable. In particular, opener “Sparkly” begins with keening voices and an echoing, electric guitar until the music drops and a rattling beat takes over, the voices now complementing the percussion and building layers. But best of all is “Night In The Ocean,” an epic deep cut steeped in debt to M83. It’s a huge, soaring track, the aural equivalent of standing in deep salt water, stoned and staring at the stars, only to switch gears with a vocal that straddles the line between spoken word and rap.

And if more tracks on Melt were like “Night In The Ocean,” it’d be a wholly remarkable release, dreamy and tropical, like a chilled out companion to Delorean’s brilliant 2009 Ayrton Senna EP. As it is, the album is a pleasant trip to take, but one that tends to narcotize and blend together, not inspire or fascinate.

I rarely have patience for coming-of-age movies. With childhood far in the rear view, and having shaken off that pesky quarter-life crisis years ago, existential angst now tends to bore me. Nowadays, I favor retrospectives in the macro sense, more in line with Terrence Malick’s narrative-lite The Tree of Life. But as a sheltered kid growing up in a religious school, I’d always wanted to see Stand by Me, the 1986 Rob Reiner-directed adaptation of a Stephen King novella. I envied the few friends lucky enough to have seen the R-rated movie as they mimicked many of its raunchiest zingers. So going into my long overdue viewing, I didn’t know whether this iconic film would be able to crack through my cynical shell, or whether I wanted it to.

Stand by Me is bookended by “present day” scenes of Richard Dreyfuss (the full-grown Gordie, otherwise played by Wil Wheaton) reminiscing about his childhood best friend Chris (River Phoenix) after he learns of his untimely death. The bulk of the film takes place in a flashback of a memorable Labor Day weekend in 1959, when Gordie and Chris teamed up with wild child Teddy (Corey Feldman) and the overweight Vern (Jerry O’Connell) in search of a missing boy’s body and the small-town fame that would accompany its discovery. While the prolonged flashback works well enough as a framing device (much as Peter Falk’s grandfatherly bedtime story did in Reiner’s A Princess Bride), the narration becomes intrusive, often telling what the live action just showed. At one point, Dreyfuss actually interrupts to explain the workings of “your mama” jokes. While all the shifts in time can be disorienting (there are flashbacks within flashbacks and plenty of dream sequences to boot), they do work for the most part. The one glaring exception may be the non sequitur “barf-o-rama” pie-eating story Wil, an aspiring writer, tells around the campfire. But boys will be boys.

Stand By Me gets its subject matter exactly right. The boys’ jokes at each others’ expense, dangerous acts performed simply for the rush of adrenaline, the smoking, the swearing, the bursting into tears despite tough guy façades — all are spot on. As cynical as I may be, I found myself remembering a time when I could relate to Feldman as he shouts “I’m in the prime of my youth, and I’m only going to be young once!” Most of their scrapes are relatively harmless, such as running from a junkyard owner and his golden retriever “guard dog” or emerging from swamp water covered in leeches. But the boys also tempt fate by recklessly handling a loaded gun and nearly getting run down by a train (one that, for some reason, doesn’t brake for fleeing children).

In the present day, the film possesses greater poignancy as the four kid actors’ real-life fates eerily paralleled those laid out at the end. O’Connell found marital bliss, landing former-supermodel Rebecca Romijn. Feldman had an eventful childhood but ended up flaming out and getting into trouble with the law. Wheaton went on to a moderately successful albeit quiet career. And most notably, Phoenix died before his time, notoriously overdosing on the street outside a Hollywood nightclub. In many ways, the film now serves as a remembrance of Phoenix at his most vital.

While I certainly would’ve loved seeing this unsupervised adventure story when I was a thrill-seeking boy, I’m glad I first saw it at 31, when I could use the occasional reminder of what it’s like to be a kid. The story, like life, is about the journey, not the destination. As Dreyfuss narrates, “We knew exactly who we were, and exactly where we were going.” Rarely have I been able to say the same.

Though there are plenty of female musicians making waves in many different genres of music, historically they are pigeonholed as sex-selling pop stars or cutesy indie girls – a simplification, but not entirely untrue. With that genealogy in mind, Montreal ethereal-pop songstress Claire Boucher (a.k.a. Grimes) delivers one of the most refreshing and challenging releases of the year. Though attaching feminist intentions to a record can be problematic, there’s something about Visions that feels like the first rumblings of a seismic shift in the labeling of sounds that are “feminine.”

Despite all its processed instruments, Visions pulses like a living and breathing entity. It opens with the breakbeat drums and high-pitched vocals of “Infinite Love Without Fulfillment,” a brief introduction to the hazy world that Boucher is about to forge. Her endlessly layered vocals dip and dive around indiscernible lyrics, akin to an extra set of synth pads rather than a clear conveyor of poetic intention. Between the vocals and pads, there are so many lead lines, hooks and melodies to keep up with that that effect is dizzying in its sheer scope. “Genesis” starts out with a soft pillow of pulsing synths while the vocal tracks, drenched in reverb and echo, bounce around as if in an empty room, before making way for a processed harp, piano and staccato, pitchy Casio blips. “Oblivion” has a more sinister beat at its core, Boucher’s breathy backing vocals and jam-packed melody creating a sense of unease despite the meshing of each added instrument.

It’s Boucher’s unique ear for creating synthesis out of displacement that elevates Visions above the trappings of the commonly applied labels of “witch house” and “freak-pop.” Much of the dissonant feeling of the album can be chalked up to the album’s deft sidestepping of any genre trappings, its ability to shape-shift just as we think we’ve got it pinned down. Even though this record achieves a certain amount of audience disillusion through lyrical ambiguity, there’s hardly a moment here that doesn’t feel highly personal. “Circumambient” pumps with the purpose of a house track but is lyrically filled with loneliness and helplessness. “Skin,” the sparse and gorgeous penultimate track, is the most intimate cut here and best displays Boucher’s strength as a lyricist, something that is often overshadowed by her complex yet intricately composed arrangements. Over a slight synth lead and some heady atmospherics, with a smooth falsetto, she laments the futility of love and the inconsistency and responsibility that comes with mutual trust: “Soft skin/ You touch me once again/ And somehow it stings/ ‘Cause I know it’s the end.” It’s one of the most piercing moments on the record, the bare arrangement signifying the intimacy and nakedness of the spiritual purging. It’s in this moment that the confidence of Boucher is revealed, as she wraps up her pop sensibilities and emotional honesty in an avant-garde blanket. This record hides its touches of angst behind walls of pop, funk and house flourishes, which, by album’s end, make “Skin” all the more striking.

Visions is a remarkable album that’s more of an evolving organism than it is a fixed physical product. The synths creep, crawl, ebb and flow with a delicate intricacy, fluctuating between club-leaning bangers and gentle, warm lead lines. Boucher’s vocals shift along with the sonic landscape, creating a unique listening experience that unearths something new with every spin. Predicting any sort of trends in a postmodern, image-focused world is a futile effort, but there’s certainly something game changing about Visions. Grimes has crafted a confident, moving and immersive work that not only seeks to break down the schism between Pop and Rock, but also makes a bold statement for female musicians who have their own unique visions and struggle to see them realized in an industry and genre continually dominated by men.

It has been 12 years since the release of Traffic, Steven Soderbergh’s remake of the 1989 British mini-series “Traffik.” The film version concentrates on three interconnected locales: an escalating drug war in Mexico, the sting operation to take down a kingpin in San Diego and Washington’s newest drug czar, an Ohio politician who cannot even prevent his own teenage daughter from falling prey to addiction. In light of the Mexican Drug War that has consumed the latter half of the ‘00s, Traffic is now a quaint, almost prescient look at the perilous direction our nearby nation has headed and how our country’s taste for drugs and its erroneous policies have fueled the conflict.

Back in 2000, violence stemming from Mexico’s drug cartels was not unheard of, but it was nothing like the current situation. Many still believed that Nixon’s deleterious War on Drugs campaign discouraged the distribution and use of narcotics in the United States. On a basic level, Traffic demonstrates just how incompetent this failed policy is, creating more harm than anything else. Written by Stephen Gaghan, who transposed the BBC’s European locales to North America, the film uses its multiple stories to point out who really suffers from these draconian policies: everyone.

The first story concerns Javier Rodriguez (Benicio Del Toro), a Tijuana cop who falls in with a crafty general who is aiding one cartel in overthrowing another. In San Diego we meet DEA agents Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle) and Ray Castro (Luis Guzmán) who are hoping to use captured dealer Eduardo Ruiz (Miguel Ferrer) to bring down syndicate head Carlos Ayala (Steven Bauer), an operation that awakens the evil in Ayala’s pregnant wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Finally, drug czar Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas) is trying to transition into his new job just as his daughter Caroline (Erika Christensen) falls deeper into drug addiction.

Traffic is right to examine all of these facets of the drug trade, but the Mexico scenes are the most intriguing and also the most problematic. Last year, 11 years after the film’s release, more than 16,000 people were slain as a result of the conflict in Mexico, up from just 62 in 2006. If Traffic was written now, would Soderbergh still concentrate on the American side of it all? Somehow, a number like 16,000 is much more staggering.

Soderbergh shoots his Mexico scenes in a bleached palette, creating a world apart from his San Diego scenes, although separated by only a few miles. Since Soderbergh films Mexico as if it’s another world (he allows his Mexican characters to speak in Spanish at least, thank God) he creates a dusty wasteland so different from the hushed blues of Wakefield’s leafy, suburban Ohio home or the bright sun of San Diego, making both of these milieu feel familiar while creating a strange alienation in the Mexico passages. It may look interesting, but Soderbergh isolates us from Javier’s struggles by playing politics. It’s as clear as the border that separates Mexico from Southern California, a border that has transposed itself into the movies.

Traffic may be a movie with a message, one that the Hollywood studio system refused to make, forcing Soderbergh to release the film independently, but it is also entertainment. It is fast-paced with a host of famous actors thrust into exciting and dangerous situations. Although it runs nearly two and a half hours, the film never feels slow, never lags. He is right to leave many of his stories open-ended because the drug war wages on. The members of one cartel kill those of another, shooting down not only soldiers but the innocents stuck in the middle of the flying bullets. For these murdered innocents, there will be no lights at night for baseball. The optimism Soderbergh tries to instill in the film’s waning moments is nothing more than fairy tale.

I once read somewhere that Steely Dan is one of the most sampled groups in hip-hop. It’s not hard to believe- the band’s sound is one that’s rife for consumption: jazzy, melodic and complex instrumentation with plenty of room to be worked around (notably in Kanye West’s “Champion”, which samples “Kid Charlemagne” and Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz’ “Deja Vu”, which flips “Black Cow”). They also pioneered the forgotten art of the “yacht rock diss war” with The Eagles, killing them on their own shit in songs like “Everything You Did” with the infamous refrain of “Turn up the Eagles/ The neighbors are listening.”

As the World’s Biggest Steely Dan Fan Who Wasn’t Around In The ‘70s, I’m aware of the band’s longevity and presence, but they never quite seemed to be as huge as they deserved. Their debut, Can’t Buy a Thrill, is a diverse and jaded antithesis to the psychedelia that dominated the end of the 1960s – it was an album for the folks who got sick of all the hippies and their pot and stuck to good ol’ cocaine, thank you very much. Steely Dan’s sharp lyricism and cynical, downbeat lyricism would also find an outlet in their sophomore effort Countdown to Ecstasy, but their crowning achievement is 1977′s Aja. It has been recognized as such officially, having been selected in 2010 by the Library of Congress as culturally significant, but no one ever talks about what a banger of an album it is. It’s a tight, focused and funky little number, clocking in at just under 40 minutes. It’s also a pinnacle of the accessibility that fusion and jazz-rock can attain, both creatively and commercially.

Aja is an album about loneliness, about longing – these songs are filled with characters who stare and wonder and plan for what’ll happen instead of living in the now. Opener “Black Cow” is a deceptively danceable number about a guy who’s tired of the philandering love of his life. Over a bass-heavy, synth stingy groove line, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker craft a moving yet hard-nosed account of a love that just can’t stand its partners. The specificity of the refrain, “It seems so clear/ That it’s over now/ Drink your big black cow/ and get out of here,” directly parallels the first lines of the song, and the dichotomy between a beverage as innocent as a black cow (a fountain soda with ice cream) and the sordid nature of the story is paramount. The duo’s keen sense of detail and for lyrical plotting and suggestiveness make all their songs into tiny short stories, pulsing with a healthy shade of noir and the obsession with idiosyncrasies that dominates the fiction of Raymond Chandler.

The title track is a thick and well-paced piece of pure jazz-rock, featuring two (!) percussive breakdowns that are augmented by a blistering saxophone solo from none other than Weather Report’s Wayne Shorter. The lyrics to the song are more impressionistic, but as Fagen sings of double helixes in the sky and nighttime thought-wandering, the rollicking guitar line gives way to the machine-gunning sax. Fagen and Becker are known for their engineering perfection, to wit, this album won a Grammy for Best Engineered Recording, Non-Classical (and Fagen’s sublime 1982 solo album The Nightfly is considered a benchmark in studio technique). Allegedly the solos in some of the tracks reached Kubrickian numbers of takes, but all for the right purpose; the haunting synth whistle that is laid under that breakdown at the end of the song is eccentric synchronicity.

The most telling and confident piece on the record is “Deacon Blues,” one of the most perfect pieces of song composition/ structure ever recorded. It’s a scummy, scuzzy little tale that sounds as gorgeous and expansive as it is lurid and intimately apocalyptic. Our titular character sings of nights started with Scotch whiskey and capped with car crashes, with a voice that slathers romance and desire into something so terrible. The mid-tempo backing track occasionally plunges in a soulful sax, particularly giving note to the lyric, “Learn to play the saxophone/ and I’ll play just what I feel.” While the register Fagen uses continuously slips while he sings the different refrains, perhaps echoing the character’s resolve, it’s a brilliant use of technique to indicate how the night that suddenly seemed so in love with doom is slowly giving way to the cold realization that it’s a cycle that will never sway, one of pity and regret. The song is soaked in a cloud of stale rotgut remains as much as its protagonist, who semi-proudly declares he wants a name when he loses.

Steely Dan’s Aja is recognized as one of the band’s more significant efforts, both in sales numbers as well as in award recognition, but its milestone status is rarely discussed. It stands as the band’s most complete exemplar of their signature sound. While they were labeled as “yacht rockers,” Aja is a mature and evolved work than the sunny skies and breezy days of yacht rock could never quite encompass. It’s more the sound of the crew, sneering and bitter and drunk, after the party’s cleared out. It’s a brilliant work that compromises no artistic vision and remains an upper echelon effort in American music.

At its most basic, On the Ice is a not unfamiliar story. An accident happens. Someone dies. Bonds of friendship are tested as guilt builds and the questions keep coming. But what makes director Andrew Okpeaha MacLean’s first full-length film remarkable is the quiet, understated examination of a fairly simple morality tale. On the Ice is a well-paced drama that shows relationships through simple actions and language, not through overly melodramatic climaxes or overused clichés.

In the small town of Barrow, Alaska, everyone appears to know each other. It’s an American town like any other, where the teenage boys hang out and get high atop water towers, talk shit and go to parties. They spin records and perform sometimes embarrassing hip hop routines for their friends, talk about girls and basically act like the idiots in progress that teenage boys are. The only differences is in Barrow are that you can swap snowmobiles for bicycles, the boys go hunting for seal and the sun doesn’t go down for months at a time. The two Iñupiaq protagonists of On the Ice, Qalli (Josiah Patkotak) and Aivaaq (Frank Qutuq Irelan) are lifelong friends, behaving more like brothers than buddies. Qalli is the shy one prepping for college, the DJ of the two. Aivaaq is brash, lovably loudmouthed; he’s the MC. Qalli is the son of an upstanding member of their little community, a highly moral man who says grace before meals and refers to meat hunted by the family as “real food.” Aivaaq’s mother is a town drunk whom another boy named James (John Miller) mockingly refers to as a skank, precipitating a sudden burst of violence. While that incident blows over and the three boys go on to party together and meet up for a hunting expedition, things quickly change. After the hunt, James doesn’t come back and the two friends decide to cover it up, dump his body in a crack in the ice and lie about what happened.

On the Ice expertly sidesteps the flaw all too common to first feature films and lets its characters reveal themselves organically, rather than through exposition or scenes of blatant telling/not showing. We see that Qalli and Aivaaq are a complementary duo through their easy chemistry together, in the way that the former awkwardly laughs while the latter maintains an easy loping stride. The film delves into the ways in which a tragedy affects an entire town with ease, with small ceremonies and the changing reactions of people standing in for the passage of time when the sun never sets. The two boy’s relationship grows strained in a wholly believable manner, with both cracking under the pressure of lies and murder in ways that are both realistic and surprising. Suffice it to say, nobody is a saint in this one. In fact, On the Ice is starkly ambiguous in terms of its central act of violence; no one is free of blame and no one is wholly guilty, which makes the tense climax all the much more unpredictable.

MacLean turns in an admirable directing job, managing the flow of the story well and using the austere Alaskan landscape to maximum potential. Long, wide shots of the ice dominate the film, creating an increasingly palpable sense of loneliness and isolation as the boys draw away from each other. Unfortunately, as first time leads, Patkotak and Irelan don’t fare nearly as well. While they convey their roles well through body language (particularly Irelan, whose increasing jitteriness is infectious), their lines and reactions come across flat and emotionless. They both often sound as though they’re reading their dialogue from just off camera, rather than as two young men caught in a tense, life or death situation. But, despite that, On the Ice succeeds in what it is: a drama that transcends a simple story and still draws you in and doesn’t let go until its final desolate, snowy shot.