Blonde, The Greatest Beer Run and Jamie Uhler’s final musical lead-in to HorrorFest 2022 on Monday Morning Diary (October 3)

 

by Sam Juliano

Incredible as it may seem, we are now into October.  The usual temperatures fluctuations and report of September hurricanes, but otherwise we move forward with an eye toward Halloween, Election Day and beyond, Thanksgiving.

I am still banging away daily at the Irish Jesus in Fairview manuscript, but the end is near.

Top 50s or Top 100’s all-time ballots can be entered on any of our site threads, including this one.

I’m well-aware of the largely mixed-to-negative responses to Andrew Dominik’s new Marilyn Monroe movie, Blonde, which I watched on Netflix last night after another decent film recommended to me by a relative. A few close friends have also panned it. Alas, I have to join those who found “Blonde” a mostly riveting, audacious and surreal experience that requires a kind of intimate immersion. I have not seen a more extraordinary performance this year than the one delivered by Ana de Armas as Marilyn, who burns holes in the screen. I’m still taking in what I saw, and I am certainly aware of the charges made against the film as being dehumanizing, exploitative and abortion propaganda. Hmmm. Not buying into any of that either.  4/5

As to The Greatest Beer Run, nothing to write home about, but harmless, occasionally funny film.  2/5/5

Jamie Uhler’s final fabulous musical lead-in to HorrorFest 2002 is below:

September 30 Comus – First Utterance (1971)

Appearing on the eve of the Halloween season, Comus’ 1971 debut First Utterance has become something of a mainstay in my Fall listening appetite, a record of beautiful textures intermingled with scary intensity. Taking their name from the Greek god of festivities and nocturnal celebrations it’s a clue to their Prog/Art rock aesthetic that they mix with acoustic balladry, bordering on genuine Folk Horror. The music moves with a seriousness as if conjured via wayward Pagan seance, Lindsay Cooper’s howling beauty embedding ‘The Herald’ with a trance like lull, planting the record into a swirling descent of demonic madness. Soon, songs are evoking terror for the listener from rape (‘Diana’, ‘Song to Comus’), necrophilia (‘Drip, Drip’) and Old World torture (‘The Prisoner’). The band backs lead vocalist Roger Wootton with flutes, oboes, violins and a litany of 6- and 12-sting acoustic guitars sounding as if Jethro Tull dropped the Hard Rock leanings and instead walked the tightrope of demonic madness from a convent in late Baroque England.

The band that would record First Utterance would begin work on a second record but their uniqueness hurt sales so they’d split shortly thereafter. Eventually reforming with different players for 1974’s eventual follow-up,To Keep From Crying which is a good record too, but the sense of the macabre is lost. Eventually reissues in the 2000’s would catapult the band to their greatest (though still nominal) prominence, as if the spells cast all those decades before had sparked something in the ether, the universe coming around like a generational solstice ready to spring its magic for all within earshot. (reissues add 4 tracks; the single-version of ‘Diana’, and the picturesque, swirling trio ‘In the Lost Queen’s Eyes’, ‘Winter Is a Coloured Bird’ and ‘All the Colours of Darkness’) But, closing the Autumnal records season I thought this one very appropriate to foreshadow the coming Horror season!

September 29 Margo Guryan – Take A Picture (1968) and Belle and Sebastian – If You’re Feeling Sinister (1996)

Many of the picks thus far have amounted to pretty dire feelings, even if the musical accompaniment is routinely, dare I say, ‘pretty’. Thinking about this I wanted to offer a slight caveat, an attempt to more accurately show my actual general feelings as the autumn’s many beauties begin making themselves apparent. This is an admission that this time of year is my favorite, and affords itself to a litany of sensory selections. Today’s selections of Margo Guryan and Belle and Sebastian more than fit that bill, offering delicate, beautifully evocative Pop. Margo Guryan is a real lost treasure, mostly known for penning ‘Sunday Mornin’’ a Spanky and Our Gang hit in 1967 that did well enough that Guryan was offered a shot at an album of her own. The result a year later, Take a Picture is wonderful, and leads off with her own reading of ‘Sunday Morning’ (she adds a ‘G’ at the end of hers) setting the table of a beautiful collection of bittersweet tunes delivered in Margo’s soft, lilting vocal style. This is a merging of the beauty of Girl Group Pop that was, by 1968, in its waning days (if already done and already growing into new forms) and the burgeoning Singer-Songwriter era that would usher the turbulent ’60’s into the Soft Rock ’70’s. All this being said, I’m sure some will still feel forlorn upon listening, as Margo croons, “I was crying in the sunshine… pretty love songs always make me sad” in ‘Love Songs’, in that delicate timbre. It’s really the power of the LP, the care her pretty voice is able to wrap the sorrowful orchestration of a bunch of really good tunes (’Take a Picture’, ‘Think of Rain’ and ‘Can You Tell’ are all first rate, and I like her own version of ‘Sunday Morning’ best as well).

Given tomorrow is the last email of this series, a record that ties in so many of the styles seemed appropriate. Linking the softness of Margo Guryan to our earlier Simon & Garfunkel autumn blows in on Belle and Sebastian’s second, though really first release, If You’re Feeling Sinister. It’s harder to think of a more autumnal feeling than what they purport on ‘Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying’, which is titled like something you’d think Dylan would offer, and it’s not far off, but their delicate softness gives it a much more inward, wallflower appeal. Perhaps my feeling of its seasonal appeal says more about my current sensibilities, but elsewhere the feelings are only reenforced; isolated moviegoing (and Greenwich Village’s favorite poet) informs ‘Like Dylan In The Movies’,while ‘Seeing Other People’ it’s a shuffling piano, the wry ‘The Stars of Track and Field’ (their underrated wit is, like the Smiths, what balances the sadness) and ‘The Fox in the Snow’, perhaps the prettiest tune of the really pretty bunch. In the subsequent 25 years after the albums release it’s easy to see just how wide a birth it had, influencing so much indie over the years. Much of it bad, but like Led Zeppelin’s or AC/DC’s influence on the Hair Metal era, shouldn’t carry a set of disparaging remarks on the original, very good, source. Belle and Sebastian are great, and If You’re Feeling Sinister is one of the decades masterworks, and because its imitators can’t touch ‘The Boy Done Wrong Again’ (at present my favorite on the album) it’s a clear enough statement on the songs incredible melancholic power. A power that stands stark in relief in a decade often thought of for vengeful gangsta rap or hyper aggressive male guitar angst. Here is a delicate alternative, one that hands us on the doorstep of the last offering tomorrow, and then into the Horrors of October.

September 28 John Cale – Vintage Violence (1970) and Nick Drake – Bryter Layter (1971)

Yesterday was a pair of pretty exquisite Pop records, and honestly, most of the thread here of Autumnal music have been pretty similar, I’ve usually offered some variation on an orchestral, folk-tinged idea of commercial music. As it turns out, today goes deeper into this idea and so will Thursday and, to a degree, Friday will as well to close out the musical selections for this year.

Vintage Violence, the first solo LP from Velvet Underground avant-garde maestro John Cale, is, or was when I first listened to it, a remarkably ‘normal’ record. You have a set of assumptions when wild artists are stripped from outré bands, believing that now they can truly let their intellectual freak flag fly and do an album as they’d always wanted. Some, however, do what John Cale did on Vintage Violence. Here, he dove into his version of the Byrds, a country-rock singer-songwriter record full of great accessible songs and melodic textures. It’s still John Cale though, so the soaring songs like ‘Gideon’s Bible’ (and interesting idea in Pop— make an approachable single about the Boxer Rebellion in China where christian evangelicals were slaughtered in masse) or the plain-spoken homesick ballad ‘Adelaide’ have a real might to their ease. ‘Big White Cloud’, for example, is positively huge, but seemingly basic, as good as Adult ‘silly’ Pop could be. He famously said the albums strange cover was him behind a glass mask with pantyhose over his face, an attempt to obscure his features completely, as if to offer his visage as nothing but ordinary and alien. These are common songs, him thinking their universality could come from anyone, but it’s hard to think of anyone but him penning ‘Fairweather Friend’ or the dreamy circular organ-drenched ‘Ghost Story’. Still, it’d have been a shock to anyone who’d previously loved his Velvet Underground work from years before.

As pleasant as Vintage Violence is, Bryter Layter is melancholy and emotionally wrought in devastation. It just so happens to also be musically beautiful, Drake being afforded a large enough assortment of musicians and studio time to craft everything in a lushness he’d never previously had (our earlier artist, John Cale as well as members of Fairport Convention appear on many of the tracks). Though beautiful, this was a somewhat unique album for its time, many critics not understanding its ‘Folk/Cocktail Jazz’ hybrid. But listening to songs like ‘One of These Things First’ and ‘Poor Boy’ the jazzy bits are cascading, shimmering past us with large female vocal accompaniment, as Drake’s finely picked Folk guitar softens the edges even more. It’s all so softly warming, ‘Hazy Jane I’ or ‘Northern Sky’ just fully serene, achingly sad music in the best way possible. I understand it all sounds counter-intuitive, but listening to ‘At the Chime of a City Clock’ I’d think it’d all comes abundantly clear. This is heartwarming music for a damp, rainy day, you might feel lost or isolated, but the music swells in a way that becomes expressionistic and an organism unto itself, a partner there to help drink the last bits of black tea in your cup or provide a shawl over your shoulders.

As we’ll see tomorrow with another artist, Nick Drake’s inability to promote the material on the road was ultimately detrimental to his success, eroding his mental state even more. It’s hard to determine if a record label should dictate (and then enforce) such a mandate to artists with debilitating stage fright and tour anxiety. But what is clear is that his incredible power as a performer and artist would have probably drew much needed adulation to his psyche as his albums hit the shelves. He’d release just one more LP, the also wonderful and stark Pink Moon, a record only he plays on, a year later in 1972 and wander, eventually taking his own life in 1974 with an overdose of his antidepressant. But here today are two nakedly honest albums from nakedly honest artists, the beginning of the Seventies really where a time when masterpieces appeared by the bushel every year weren’t they?

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