Small Victories for the Common Man (Grant Hart x 2)

Finally got some proper layout back on the blog. Paragraphs are now somewhat subtly placed apart, and block quotes have ordinary line spacing. Maybe I'm a perfectionist, but the absence of those features was really wrecking with my head and my ability to write a good blog post.

(It turns out there was a p missing in my .post-body {, and hence the margin settings weren't affecting my paragraphs. The blockquote line spacing had just been reset. All thanks to a universal Blogger update of the CSS template... darn mysterious interweb.)

I only know a little HTML - pidgin HTML if you will - so it took a couple of weeks before I finally sat down and realised what I had to do. Not much thanks to the various blogger support groups, but at least the various instructions for editing CSS pointed me in the right direction. That's not really the reason why I haven't posted in a little while, but it can do for now.

The above two albums are post-Husker Du releases from Grant Hart, the drummer and other creative powerhouse of the band along with Bob Mould. I posted his first post-Husker Du release, the 2541 EP, here already. These are full-length albums, one under his own name and the other with his relatively short-lived band, Nova Mob. Good News For Modern Man in particular is absolute pop gold; the 'concept album' of Last Days of Pompeii is less successful, but it's still a lot of fun to listen to. The prime Grant Hart solo release, as I understand it, is his first full-length, Intolerance; and while his post-Husker Du career isn't quite as productive as Mould's, even these two albums represent some brilliant moments.

Good News For Modern Man is an album I picked up from eMusic some years ago, after having heard Metal Circus and possibly Zen Arcade. On that basis, it comes as quite a shock - it's pure pop kitsch. Considering Husker Du's later albums, and the direction Hart took his share of the band's songs into, it's less surprising, but still it stands out as twee, jangly nostalgic pop - something I have a soft spot for when it's done with the right kind of style. And whatever about style, this is also one of the most likeable albums you could ever hear.

Probably my favourite song on the album is 'Run Run Run To The Centre Pompidou' for the infectious exuberance of the chorus, but in truth all the songs are just as catchy and hook-laden as each other. 'A Letter From Anne Marie' and 'In A Cold House' are wonderfully and simply evocative, alternately loud and meditative, but the sonic masterpiece of the album is the atmospheric 'Teeny's Hair'. Lyrically, it has something to do with Apollinaire and Duchamps, but musically it's like an apotheosis of Zen Arcade-type experimental pop.

Grant Hart - Good News For Modern Man (Pachyderm, 1999)

Less directly or accessibly pop, and far more experimental, is The Last Days of Pompeii. Preceding Good News for Modern Man by about 8 years (it came out on Rough Trade in 1991, a few years after Intolerance) this is a frankly bizarre debut for the band. The idea seemed attractive - after all, Zen Arcade was a concept album of sorts - and I spent some time hunting this down as the second addition to my Grant Hart collection. After the effort, it turned out to be a bit of a disappointment although when I go back to it, I still quite enjoy it.

The Last Days of Pompeii is unfortunately, much more disjointed and patchy than the sublime genius of the other album. It's, essentially, a bunch of atmospherics, weird songs, a few weirdly catchy songs, and a theme about the destruction of Pompeii amongst other historical events. On the last part, these sort of meanings tend to pass me by, but Wikipedia mentions an 1834 novel by the same title

"written by the baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1834. Once a very widely read book and now relatively neglected, it culminates in the cataclysmic destruction of the city of Pompeii by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. The novel uses its characters to contrast the decadent culture of first-century Rome with both older cultures and coming trends."

which sounds quite close to the apparent 'concept' of this album. Musically, it has some pop moments as good as anything on Good News for Modern Man. It has that great Grant Hart sound, perhaps not crafted into the strongest of albums, but still there nevertheless. From the stirring introduction and bombast of 'Woton', the lighter exuberance of 'Getaway (Gateway) In Time', 'Wernher Von Braun' or 'Where You Gonna Land (Next Time You Fall Off Of Your Mountain', to the evocative atmospherics of 'Lavender and Grey' and the closing song with its 'Benediction' of an erupting mountain (sorry to give the ending away, I guess), it's a fun ride. It doesn't hang together perfectly - it wanders off into a track pretty upfront-ly entitled 'Space Jazz', for example - but the parts that it is intended to hang on, like the two versions, regular and 79 A.D., of 'Admiral of the Sea' are memorable enough.

Nova Mob - The Last Days of Pompeii (Rough Trade, 1991)

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This doesn't have anything much to do with Grant Hart - although Nazi Germany might be a sub-theme of Last Days of Pompeii, in which case this video fits right in: it's a mash up of one of the scenes from Der Untergang (Downfall), the recent excellent film about Hitler's last days in his bunker, and the imagined reaction of Irish Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, to the Lisbon treaty result as it came in. It's just brilliant.

This issue (Lisbon) being another part of the reason why I haven't felt quite like posting recently, I'll post it up just for the laugh. It's so very wrong, perhaps, but the matching of the dialogue to the emotions is hilariously and subversively perfect. If you're not au fait with Irish politics, you'll probably miss some of the more specific references, but the gist of it is pretty clear*. Satire at its novel (though this has been done for other situations, apparently), focused best. Especially the first 1:00...

* And yes, Brian Cowen or Biffo, as we call him**, is a notorious swearer. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Cowen#Public_image)

** Biffo - 'Big Ignorant Fellow*** From Offaly'

*** Rephrase as to taste.

Taoiseach = prime minister, head of government, by the way.