Skip to main content

Lou Barlow: Reason to Live review – the sound of domestic bliss

(Joyful Noise)
A warm new contentment becomes the formerly angst-filled lo-fi rocker

It would hardly take a genius to notice the thick vein of heartbreak that has run through Lou Barlow’s career away from Dinosaur Jr, whether in Sebadoh, the Folk Implosion or as a solo artist. As a chronicler of unrequited love and self-lacerating introspection, he has had few peers over the past three decades. But times change and, as anybody lucky enough to have caught last summer’s streamed lockdown shows from his Massachusetts home (with frequent unscripted interruptions from his young daughter) will have noticed, his life now is the very picture of domestic bliss.

Far from being a creative hindrance, this change in circumstances suits Barlow’s muse. While many of the songs here differ little stylistically from his lo-fi self-recorded contributions to 1991’s brilliantly sprawling Sebadoh III – it’s largely just his voice and his acoustic guitar – the variation in tone and mood is a definite upgrade. Lead single Love Intervene is refreshingly brisk and upbeat, its underlying message essentially that love is the answer, while Act of Faith sounds positively exultant. Even songs that might once have sounded angstily passive-aggressive (most notably All You People Suck) are now imbued with warmth. It all adds up to a highly pleasing change of direction.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3uwyqN3
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

Elena Ferrante: ‘Solaris is not Tarkovsky’s best film, but it made the greatest impression on me’

Solaris is astonishing because the book that inspired it doesn’t seem to contain Tarkovsky’s film A film that I watch at least once a year is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris . I’ve loved all of Tarkovsky’s works, even the most difficult. Some I’ve seen in the cinema, others on television. I saw Andrei Rublev at the cinema, and on the big screen it was astonishing, its black-and-white extraordinary: I’ll probably never see it again in a cinema, but I hope that young people will have the opportunity. I also saw Solaris on the big screen – not Tarkovsky’s best film, but the one that made the greatest impression on me. I remember that it was advertised as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey – a completely misleading slogan. To see in it a cinematic contest between the US and the USSR was as silly as it was misleading. Kubrick’s marvellous film, with its imaginative force, would certainly win. But it doesn’t have even a hint of the desperation, of the sense of loss, that dominates Sol...
Post a Comment
Read more