SO/SN/SB/SB — 4/17/23

Something Old

I finally watched Encino Man. It had been on my list for a while, probably since Brendan Fraser started to garner some Oscar heat for The Whale (he ultimately won the Best Actor award), and it was like "haha that goofy caveman guy from that dumb but possibly underrated '90s comedy is gonna win an Oscar!" I like dumb underrated comedies, and so here we are.

It was pretty much what I expected in most regards. Some silly Pauly Shore humor, some sight gags, a cheesy ending that takes place at prom, and so on. All the usual high school comedy tropes are still here, even if that high school now features grown man Brendan Fraser portraying a caveman posing as a teenage student. Lots of solid laughs to be wrung from that extremely asinine premise!

I dunno, maybe I'm reading into it a little more than was intended, but I feel like there was something enlightening happening in this film too that kind of went unsaid. The joke is that the caveman (cognomen of "Link") doesn't even speak English, and yet somehow becomes the most popular guy in school (much to the confusion of Sean Astin's Dave, who has been sweating it out for years trying to be popular).

 

But when I say he "somehow" becomes popular, I think those would be the words used by the film. The answer to how he becomes popular is clear to me: he's just nice to people. He befriends the white rapper dudes and the math geeks, and when the math geek (played by likewise 2023 Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan) is made fun of by those white rapper dudes, Link just kinda puts his arm around the geek, as if to say, "don't worry about them, I'm cool with everyone." It's like if Dazed and Confused's Randall Floyd was also a caveman who spoke in grunts and growls.

So that kinda made me marvel at the movie a little bit, that it was able to hit that particular sweet spot in my psyche... even though it's probable that the movie doesn't care about this shit one bit and was more enamored with Pauly Shore acting silly. So be it! We see the film that we want to see!

Something New

Jury's still out as to whether the new iteration of Black Country, New Road—without former frontman Isaac Wood, whose departure from the band right before the release of their great 2022 album Ants from Up There was well-documented on this blog—is going to be able to hit the same heights as the have previously. Can't knock 'em for trying though!

And try they do on the latest release, Live from Bush Hall, which is technically a live album, but which is comprised of nine brand new songs, so I'm fucking with it in a way that I wouldn't normally a live album. The vocals are now handled by other members of the band, mostly bassist Tyler Hyde, and she does kinda bring the same energy as Wood did! Kind of. She's trying. They're all trying. It's really nice to hear.

That sort of circling the wagons and becoming more tight-knit in the face of an impossible loss is kind of what propels the first song on the album, "Up Song," into epic territory. The chorus: "Look at what we did together / BCNR, friends forever!" Corny, but damn does it fucking fit the occasion. And yelling that slogan as the band crashes back in creates, for me, one of the best musical moments of 2023 so far. It's so great that it honestly makes me excited for this new future of the band, even if it's the only song on here that does to that degree.

Something Borrowed

SPIN indicates that they have a regular feature called "Band Jury," in which a musician chooses another artist's album to "defend." I tried searching for the archives to this column, but apparently the one I read today was the inaugural column entry. Luckily, it's a good one. Carl Newman, of the New Pornographers (who were last week's Something New) defended an album that I've already spent years defending as underrated—Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's Some Loud Thunder.

"I felt like [Some Loud Thunder] had all the things that made the first record good, but it was a little odder," he says. "And in this case, that oddness did not pay off for them. I think a lot of people just thought, 'This is too weird.' You know how sometimes what people love about a band is what people start to dislike about them? Their first record comes out, and people go, 'He kinda sings like David Byrne! Cool!' Then the next record comes out, and people are like [in an annoyed tone], 'He sounds like David Byrne!' [Laughs.] A compliment can become an insult very quickly."

Read the whole interview HERE. A couple points. One, I think that the important thing that Newman alludes to is how crucial context is when you're getting into an album. He mentions listening to the self-titled album when he was starting to date his now-wife. I vividly recall listening to Some Loud Thunder as I was unpacking my shit freshman year after winter break, ready to start a fresh semester. An album can be good in a vacuum, but to be great, nostalgia probably has to play at least somewhat of a role.

Two, I feel like Newman and I are saying the same thing about Some Loud Thunder—it's secretly great and totally underrated—but coming at it from different angles. It feels like Newman is approaching it by saying that it was "weirder," and that's what makes it interesting sonically, though also what pushed people away. I'm saying that the weirdness was a front designed to chase people away. Like, "let's keep the true fans around." Regardless, it's the same outcome, and all this to say that you should probably check that sophomore CYHSY album out again if you haven't in a while.

Something Blue

I think the only thing that would've stopped me from shitting as hard as I could on that stupid CANDIACE album from a couple weeks ago would be if I somehow knew Candiace Dillard Bassett personally. Obviously, that wasn't the case, and so I was pretty comfortable saying that it was the worst album we've ever listened to in the space of Record Club, and list the reasons why while foaming at the mouth.

That is to say, if I do know someone, then obviously the stakes are different. I'm just not going to review something in the same way, if at all. "Conflict of interest" exists for a reason. It's not fair to the artist or the reviewer or the audience if you're pulling punches or being more generous than you would be otherwise. It's usually incredibly unlikely that an artist whom we're writing about on here would actually visit the blog. But for those few: you never know, and so we refrain.

What are the chances of Kane Kalas—son of Phillies broadcasting legend Harry Kalas—reading PoYB? Slim, but not out of the question. I'd consider him an acquaintance; he was at my 27th birthday party, but that was probably the last time I saw him. He released an album last week called High Hopes. I tried to get our mutual friend Dwyer to choose it for Record Club, but I think the right decision was made—let's avoid conflicts of interest, let's avoid saying anything about the art created by anyone I've ever met in real life, and let's just say that you can check it out if you want to, and come to your own conclusions, far away from this stinkin' blog.