Take Five: Follow the path where it leads

Five things that caught my ear and eye this week: Panda Bear and Sonic Boom go mariachi, 'Flipside' hits home, Bono is slightly less insufferable for a moment, and more.

“Take Five” is posted each Friday, and offers five things I spent some time with over the course of the previous week. No criticism, no in-depth analysis, just a few things I think you might be interested to check out. When the spirit moves me, I’ll post other things at other time times.

I don’t set out to craft this list around a theme, but following the path where it leads and making the most of the opportunities placed before you certainly seems to be a through line here. Enjoy.

1. Song remixes usually don't do anything for me, but the seemingly endless ways Panda Bear and Sonic Boom have reworked and recontextualized the songs from their Reset project have been rather captivating. The songs themselves are already a remix or recontextualization of sorts, with Sonic Boom looping the intros from '60s singles by artists like Eddie Cochran and the Everly Brothers, and Panda Bear then creating melodies and lyrics to layer over top. Additional instruments were added, and the result was an album of songs with a modern slant on retro pop. That was August 2022. An instrumental and remix album came later that fall, followed in August 2023 by an album with dub versions of the songs. Neither rose to the level of the original, but there were interesting diversions. Now, with the passage of another year, comes what they say is the final chapter of the Reset saga, an EP of mariachi versions of some Reset tunes. For example, "Livin' in the After" is based on the opening to the Drifters' "Save the Last Dance for Me." 

   The new EP, showing just how much mariachi influence there was in the Drifters' tune and the Reset creation, features "Viviendo en las sequelas," sung on one track by Panda Bear and on another by Mariachi 2000, the band that performs the music on the track. This remake pushes the song a step further from its source material, and feels like nothing so much as a classic mariachi tune that in some ways feels like its most perfect form. Reset track "Danger" ("Peligro" in this version) rounds out the EP. Each song is presented twice: once with Panda Bear on vocals, and once with the Mariachi singer in the lead.

2. I saw a post on Monday morning from our local indie cinema, FilmScene, about their slate for the week. "Flipside" was among the films listed. The image showed a guy standing in front of a record shop. I associate the name "Flipside" with a music zine from the '90s, so these two things were enough to pique my interest. Reading about the film, it didn’t sound like a typical documentary about a record store. One review on Rotten Tomatoes said, "Go see this film. Don't even read about it. Just go," so I did. If there is a film more tailored to me, I haven't seen it yet.

   

   This is the story of Chris Wilcha, a television commercial director with one documentary film under his belt. He's around my age, a white, fairly affluent guy working in the arts or adjacent to it. And, the trait that speaks most clearly to me, is that he has a past littered with unfinished projects. Started with good intentions, these are represented by hard drives that line shelves in his home. Driven by a trip to the record store where he worked as a teen and the sad state of affairs there, he decides to start yet another project: A film that will help to tell the store’s story and rescue it from near-certain demise. Abandoning that as well, he adds it to the stack while life gets in the way. To explain how he got from that to the film that is on screen is to give away the entire film, but suffice to say, if you don’t come away from the theater with a renewed sense of purpose, a faith in the worthiness of your own half-finished projects, and a dedication to making better use of the time you have, you should go watch it again.

   

3. LitHub recently published a piece that ranked "100 of the Greatest Posters of Celebrities Urging You to Read." Otherwise known as READ posters. We've all seen these in our libraries and elsewhere. One criterion the writer chose was apt: "How Normally Are They Holding The Book?" So many of these posters feel like promotion for the actor or musician in question rather than for the act of reading. Some look as if the person has never held a book before. That's why my favorite of these features — surprise, surprise — R.E.M. When you see Michael Stipe with a stack of books on  his knee, you have every confidence he has read or is about to read those books. Bill Berry uses the moment for a little advocacy, cradling 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth alongside the region-appropriate Flannery O'Connor, while Peter Buck holds the collected works of Oscar Wilde. Mike Mills, more than 20 years before joining a band called The Baseball Project, holds a W.P. Kinsella book. The poster, which comes in at No. 7 on the LitHub list, was so iconic that the band agreed to have it made into a jigsaw puzzle back in 2020 to raise money for the American Library Association. Alas, it is sold out. Maybe I’ll come across one a couple decades from now at whatever retirement center I call home.

4. On July 8, 1984, Bob Dylan played Slane Castle in Ireland. It is an iconic show in Dylan's career, in part because guests like Santana, Van Morrison and Bono joined him on stage. Bono was on site because U2 had just wrapped up preliminary recordings for The Unforgettable Fire in the castle, and the singer was apparently still staying there. Hot Press, an Irish music mag, learned of this potential inter-generational meet-up, and had Bono interview Dylan. Bono’s turn on stage is cringe-worthy, mainly because the same thing that riles up a U2 crowd seems incongruously earnest at a Dylan show. He's a youngster who also doesn't have any clue as to the lyrics of the songs he's asked to sing — "Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat" and "Blowin' in the Wind" — and his attempts to ad lib fall flat.

   

   The chat between the two (with Morrison occasionally chiming in as well), however, is interesting. Tellingly, after working with the mercurial Brian Eno, Bono's first question is, "When you're working with a producer, do you give him that lee-way to challenge you?" and “Have you had somebody in the last five years who said "that's crap Bob?" The conversation turns to the state of modern studios, and Dylan unwittingly affirming U2's decision to record in a castle. "Even if you go in and record it live, it's not gonna sound like it used to sound, because the studios now are so modern, and overly developed, that you take anything good and you can press it and squeeze it and squash it, and constipate it and suffocate it." Bono wisely praises Dylan's Shot of Love, earning points with the master: 

Bob: You're one of the few people to say that to me about that record, to mention that record to me.

Bono: That has that feeling.

Bob: It's a great record, it suits just about everybody.

The piece was published 40 years ago next week, and it's an illuminating read.

5. I hate to get sucked into those random posts on Facebook from accounts with names like "90s Indie Rock Nostalgia" that share old photos and intriguing little stories, yet I do. One this week about the video for Depeche Mode's "Enjoy the Silence" caught my eye. It seems singer David Gahan thought the idea of him walking around nature in a regal robe and crown was stupid, but it became one of the most iconic videos — and images — of the band's career. The rabbit hole thus breached, I watched parts of a couple of those "hearing 'Enjoy the Silence' for the first time" videos from vocal coaches that were fairly enlightening, and it all led back to one of my favorite covers of all time:  Nada Surf's power pop take on "Enjoy the Silence." It remakes the song as a hook-filled anthem while losing none of what made the song such a towering synth-pop wonder.