From the Editor's Desk
After a long hiatus to clear my mind and focus on other projects, I have decided to return to producing “Aesthete Alley”. Going forward, I anticipate issues every 1-2 weeks. Furthermore, the release calendar now features a curated list as opposed to the previous lists which had every known album and movie release within a certain size.
-The Editor
Table Of Contents
What Does An “Album” Actually Mean?
The traditional format of an album as a group of songs released at the same time all together was formalized with the invention of the record which was standardized to have a runtime of around 40 minutes (20 minutes per side) with the vinyl record of the 1950s. The length of albums then was largely a result of commercial forces and not an unspoken rule devised by artists. A cursory search of Spotify for any album made in this time will reveal the rather strict time limitation of 40 minutes which seems relatively short compared to many of the drawn-out albums released today. Despite changes in musical storage technology starting with the CD and the cassette tape in the 60s and 70s, the album structure was maintained. Albums, however, could now utilize the extra hardware space to increase their length with CDs allowing for a runtime of around 80 minutes. Fast forward to the present day where music streaming services rule supreme and the album has still found a way to stick around. Though artists are offered the choice to release music instantaneously and with zero production costs, they still choose to periodically drop collections of songs with possibly one or two singles acting as precursors to the main album. There are multiple reasons for this such as a need to have enough musical material to make a physical copy (for the record purists and superfans) to increase revenue and the fact that albums effectively organize a discography for artistic reasons as well as marketability.
While the album length might have started out as a byproduct of technological and commercial limitations, this does not mean that the structure of an album cannot have artistic meaning imbued into it. Inherently, albums break up an artist’s discography into definable categories. While not always the case, as artists tend to change and evolve over the years, having albums oftentimes mark distinct stylistic periods (or eras) in an artist’s musical career. In this case, the album usefulness lies in organizational benefits. However, the album can also be viewed as an almost distinct artist medium unto itself. This occurs when the songs individually tell a larger narrative across the album’s runtime. In short, the sum of the parts becomes greater than the whole. Thus, the album has developed to be a container through which songs can work together to relay an artistic experience in a similar way that movies are container through which scenes work together. An album conceived to accomplish this goal is elevated to more than just a collection of songs because the songs build off of each other and weave context together making the messages and musicality more potent than if they had been released individually. Perhaps the simplest example of this can be found in the cast recordings of musicals. Obviously, the musical is designed to include visual and auditory elements but many people listen to the music on its own. In a musical album, for example Hamilton, the songs are all in service of a larger narrative allowing them to work as a cohesive unit and greatly enhance the drama and meaning in the songs. While musical albums are an extreme example of this because they oftentimes sacrifice musical elements in favor of a clear story, albums of other genres are capable of achieving similar results. To do this, however, requires lots of planning and foresight and most importantly, the artist must have some artistic meaning to express.
There exists a question as to the value or quality added by making an album that is coherent and unified in expressing a focused message. In other words, is a folk album that is carefully plotted to tell an emotional journey automatically worse than an experimental synthpop album which has little message or meaning behind it and is focused on exploring the technical limits of sound? The question is complicated further by the fact that many musicians today simply do not care enough to attempt to craft an album which utilizes the format instead merely dropping whatever tracks they have written onto a project and calling it an album. I am not saying this is a bad thing but only that it is a thing that does happen. It is also common today to see artists drop many different versions of the album (such as deluxe, acoustic, club remix, etc.) oftentimes in an attempt to get more plays and revenue. Once again, this is not necessarily a bad thing but many times, it demonstrates a lack of care and attention to using the album structure itself as part of the artistry. In my mind, an analogous scenario to many albums which are churned out today is if a film studio released a movie that was made up of 5 or so short films, each great in their own right, but still not adding up to a whole movie. I might like many of the songs on your album, but listening to the album does not add anything more than listening to each of the songs individually. A change of terminology might be needed and would likely be appreciated by the artists who do not care to utilize the album format in an artistic way. What we need is a term that still organizes songs together, but does not imply any meaning in their grouping. A word for a collection of songs which can be played individually, forwards, backwards, mixed up, etc. without any other associations that come with the term album. This new term would not only remove any expectations from projects which only have a few good singles and are largely incoherent as well as giving people an incentive to begin to listen to entire albums because they know that they have been intentionally designed to be one contained listening experience.
Civil War Review
A24’s Civil War attempts to masquerade as a dramatic epic which reveals insights into the effects of politics and political identities but instead presents a visually gorgeous and tense action thriller on the lives of war photographers in a generic lawless warzone.
Civil War is directed by Alex Garland and stars Kirsten Dunst as Lee Smith, an intrepid and famous battlefield photographer, who decides to venture into the thick of the ongoing civil war to get pictures of the president before Washington D.C. falls to opposing forces. Tagging along with Smith is an amateur photographer named Jessie Cullen and several reporters. As they travel through the war-torn countryside, the group encounter a variety of perils and dangerous scenarios which show the best and worst parts of humanity.
It was no surprise that Civil War was a very heavily anticipated movie, especially from those more involved in the art cinema community. A24 is well known for investing money into films that are more unique and artistic than the average Hollywood blockbuster and Civil War had the largest budget of any A24 film to date. The polarized climate of America today has also caused many to be fearful and fascinated by the potential for violence to emerge out of partisan divides. However, if you are going to release a film and market it as a grand epic movie about a modern-day version of the deadliest war in American history, you had better deliver. Unfortunately, Garland has created a film which seems to deliberately steer away from its own title, spending very little time explaining or analyzing the causes and effects of the war. Instead, the movie pivots and becomes an entertaining, albeit smaller scale, story of war photographers and the risks and moral dilemmas that they face in their work.
This bait and switch where the large civil war is substituted for secluded encounters among the war photographers is very detrimental to the film because, audiences are going to measure it against their expectations, and in that respect, it is a complete failure. The war elements of the movie are almost nonexistent for the first two acts with most of the action being derived from individuals and small groups which are never given context in the larger war. As if to overcompensate, the third act is essentially one giant action sequence which almost seems like one long video game cutscene one would find at an arcade shooter. The audience is given almost no information about the civil war itself which makes the setting which had so much potential, function as merely a generic lawless warzone which could be substituted for any other warzone to the same effect.
When viewed as a movie about war photographers, Civil War is an entertaining if uncommitted viewing experience. It is gorgeously shot and has lots of striking imagery which are sure to linger with the viewer. Additionally, many of the interactions which the characters go through are thrilling and bring up pertinent and interesting questions about the nature of deadly conflict. Surprisingly, the film seems to portray the reporters and war photographers as quite villainous and uncaring, asking the question whether it is okay to act as an entirely neutral entity, passing no judgement and taking no action when brutality and murder are committed right in front of your eyes. The film deserves praise for being blatant and obvious with messaging opting to let the viewer decide for themselves the values of the characters actions. The acting performances in Civil War are excellent though the characters are hard to get deeply attached to because they are not focused on enough. Once again, the setting of the film hinders the story it is trying to tell as the civil war aspects draw attention away from fleshing out the main characters and their motivations. The film uses music to affect the tone which can seem a bit jarring but reflects the reality that things that seem horrific and violent to us are treated as routine and normal by the main characters of the story. Expectations aside, Civil War is a highly entertaining war photographer film which is sure to keep one’s interest even if it does not live up to the limitless potential of its premise.
Poor Things Review
Poor Things is a 2023 political, fantasy film directed by Yorgos Lanthimos which tells the story of Bella Baxter, a girl who is created by a wacky scientist with the brain of a child in the body of a full-grown woman and goes on a journey to discover how she will live her life. The film stars Emma Stone in the leading role along with Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott, and Jerrod Carmichael.
Underneath the weird and whimsical world of quasi-steampunk aesthetics and discordant melodies, Poor Things is a shallow and superficial attempt to portray the political ideology of “sex-positive feminism” as a heroic and rationale position.
It must be acknowledged that the set design and costuming for the film are in large part responsible for it not becoming dull throughout the 142-minute runtime. Clearly, the artists behind these elements of the film had a specific otherworldly feel they were trying to capture and it pays dividends in the finished work. Poor Things is filled with gorgeous shots filled with vibrant pastel colors which bring to life the key locations of the film. The sets and costuming bring the viewer into a new world which is certainly not normal and bring a surrealist aspect to the movie. The costuming perfectly melds with this atmosphere through the use of flamboyant, avant-garde dresses and more traditional upper-class fashion. Another aspect of filmmaking that works in service of immersing the audience in the world of the movie is the music, which uses instruments in a minimalistic style, incorporates strange and semi-dissonant harmonies which accentuate the stories zaniness. (An example of this would be “Bella” from the soundtrack).
The acting in Poor Things is also selectively excellent with Emma Watson giving a captivating performance (though it is not as impressive as it has been lauded as being) and Mark Ruffalo having some flashes of comedic brilliance. In the lead role, Emma Watson is forced to capture a wide range of emotions as she develops from essentially infancy into mature adulthood. However, as will be discussed at length later on, the script fails her in this department so that her performance never feels like that of a real human developing and growing. Nevertheless, the uncanniness and full commitment to the role is what makes the viewer unable to look away whenever Watson is on screen. Mark Ruffalo suffers from accent fluctuations which make some of his dialogue distracting, but when he is good in the film, he is very good and quite funny at times. Willem Dafoe is also in the film but his performance did not stand out as being memorably excellent or terrible, merely passably good. There was one performance which was highlighted by its jarring quality was that of Jerrod Carmichael. For some reason, whether through the fault of the director or the actor, every line of Carmichael’s character came across as though the actor was reading the lines for the first time, in a painfully overpronounced voice off a sheet of paper. The character gets only a short amount of screentime but it sticks in the viewers head because of how much it breaks the viewer out of the cohesive immersion that everyone else is working so hard to maintain.
Though the acting and visuals of Poor Things are worthy of praise, the story and the politics underlying it are an enormous mess. This is unfortunate because the story and message is the most important part of a film and for a movie like Poor Things, it ends up being all fluff and no substance, so to speak. This is exemplified by the seemingly random and casual use of the fisheye camera, for no discernable reason other than because it looks aesthetically artsy and different. This leads to the movie looking drastically better and more deeply conceived than it realistically is. As far as the story goes, Poor Things does an unconvincing job at best of following through on its premise. If, as we are led to believe, Emma Watson has the brain of an infant at the start of the movie and eventually mentally matures through childhood to adulthood, then the director and screenwriter have done a terrible job at showing this development. This is due to the fact that Watson’s Bella Baxter behaves much less like a human child, and much more like a computer. It seems that Lanthimos believes that in the absence of traditional socialization, a child will develop to be non-judgmental, without prejudice, and purely rational. However, the opposite is true. Children (and humans in general) are usually far more likely to be prejudiced and overly emotional and have to be taught against these tendencies by their civilizing influences. There was only one occasion where Watson’s Bella Baxter behaved like a child and was overcome by her emotions rather than acting in a cold and rational manner. Because of the way Bella was written, it is almost impossible to see her as human, much less feel a strong human bond to her because she feels so alien. Additionally, and this is much less important, Watson’s Bella Baxter is repeatedly described by the male characters of the film as being extraordinarily beautiful, yet it seems the makeup and hairstylists have gone out of their way to make her appear uglier and more unnatural. The reason for this is unclear.
Finally, the movie fails on its political messaging, both because it fails to honestly or meaningfully tackle its themes, and because the vision it presents is not the utopian future that most people would like. Whether the viewer agrees with or disagrees with Lanthimos’ opinions on “sex-positive” feminism, it is clear that the skewed world and story that he has created do not meaningfully argue for his political ideas. Bella Baxter, who is made out to the “sex-positive” feminist icon, does nothing wrong in the film (which is not a problem in and of itself), but she is offered absolutely no honest resistance. The film is unwilling to even engage in the debate of the philosophical ideas it brings up. Instead, the characters are either fully benevolent and in agreement with Lanthimos’ ideology, or else they are corrupt through and through and condemnable by all except the most despised fringes of society. For example, there is no defending of Mark Ruffalo’s character when he effeminately protests Bella’s work as a prostitute, because he himself is a hedonist and is mad at Bella only because he has no control over her. Imagine instead if there was a male character in Bella’s life who believed that she should adhere to a stricter sexual ethic, not because he wanted to control her, but because he held himself to that standard and believed in its benefits. Lanthimos sidesteps all debate in favor of a bland and boring story which has little to no conflict and only remains interesting due to the fantastical visuals, music, and actors, doing their best with a lackluster script. Furthermore, while emotionless and uncaring philosophy of Bella might appeal to the Hollywood elite, the vast majority of moviegoer will feel detached and somewhat disheartened by what is put on screen in front of them. The triumphant indulgent feeling Lanthimos clearly believes the final scene of the movie should hold is more likely to be replaced by pity from the audience who will see Bella as an abused victim by a mad scientist and a society which encourages her to lead a life of emotional detachment and withdrawal from all responsibility.
Charm Review
One sentence summary: Clairo’s Charm is a dreamy sonic experience with plenty of acoustic harmonies and interesting touches which makes the tracks hold up even after many listens.
Charm is the third studio album by singer-songwriter Clairo (Claire Cottrill) and features 11 new songs and a runtime of 38 minutes. The album is tonally consistent in both subject matter and sound sticking to tried and true love song formulas with an alternative almost “70s” sound. The instrumentation and production on the album are fantastic with many instrumental solos which present unique and vibrant counter melodies and harmonies which add depth to the songs. The songwriting on display on the album is also top notch with the melodies being catchy and interesting, despite their being limited vocal range. The vocals on the album are perhaps the weak point as they sometime seem to get overshadowed in clarity by the backing instruments. It seems that Clairo has opted for a lowkey style which lacks power or an edge. While this is not inherently a problem, it tends to hold back some of the more upbeat songs with melodies that would benefit from a little more emotion. This is not to say that Clairo has a bad voice as the vocals are certainly pleasant (in particular when they are harmonically layered) but that they are very low energy which is awkward to contrast with the clear clarinet or piano solos. This brings up a problem with the mix as a whole because the vocals seem to be out of focus with the rest of the production. Hazy vocals should generally be accompanied by hazy drums and backing. Lyrically, the album has its moments but is not on the whole going to blow any listener away and is at times juvenile.
Standouts on the album include the titular track “Nomad” for its excellent bridge, “Sexy to Somebody” for its catchy melody, “Second Nature” for the jazz sound, “Thank You” due to its memorable verse and 7 chords, “Juna” for the lo-fi melodies, and “Pier 4” for being a lullaby-like closer. The weakest tracks on the project were in my opinion, “Slow Dance” for its length and repetition, and “Echo” because I dislike the chord progression.
All in all, I would highly recommend this album to anyone who likes jazz or acoustic pop and is looking for a relaxing lowkey listening experience. I give this album an 8.5/10.