The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - 5 The Michigan Daily - michigandailycom Tuesday, September iS, 2009 - 5 Illustrating the sound lbum art used to sell music. Before music preview blogs, before Pitchfork, one of the primary things that spoke for the music, besides the music itself - , obviously, was the illustration f stuck to the front of the LP, - cassette tape or WHITNEY CD. I specifi- POW cally remember being 12 and going to the record store to pick up Oasis's Be Here Now not because I knew any of the songs, but because of the album art. The cover of BeHere Now depicts a collage of images: a white Rolls Royce sunken in the middle of a turquoise pool of water, a despondent-looking Gallagher brother standing in the foreground next to a European motorbike with a gramophone aimed at him. The surreal imagery, I think, is what sold me. I assume that many oth- ers have experienced the thrill of strongly associating an album's musical twists and turns with the images provided on the album cover. One of my most vivid child- hood memories is listening to the intro crescendo of "D'You Know What I Mean?" while I, in my mind's eye, floated around in a sur- realist landscape ofsinkingcars and motorbikes. While album covers try to sell you their musical contents with images, with time these images really do begin to speak for them- selves - they become iconic. You can spot the pop-art banana on The Velvet Underground's album The Velvet Underground and Nico from 50 yards away and still know which album it is. And, similarly, Chicago's twin Marina City tow- ers on Wilco's Yankee Hotel Fox- trot have become so iconic that, when I recently found myself in the windy city and looked up to find those towers above me, hinged on the skyline, the first thing I thought was "Wow, those are or "Wov cobs. Yo then, renov ists cl image Youtl albur taken by Ge tial cc ist. R his p1 whici tions of am quali - usi The i dreamy albur Sonic time itself captu togra An cover pl9 Rollir memo tight bulge conce pre-e 1960s cover signa the m iconi crash have, monp on on all tin was t visua the al conte n the cover of YHF," not Similarly, the cover of Radio w, those look a lot like corn Ethiopia by Patti Smith contains " Because they really do. a striking image indebted to New u wouldn't be surprised, York photographer Judy Linn. that many bands have There's an almost a voyeuristic wned contemporary art- quality present in the album art, reate these iconic album where a skinny, waif-like Smith es for them. Take Sonic sits on the floor in a windbreaker, h's Daydream Nation - the looking away from the camera. s's prominent candle was Linn was a close friend of both from the painting Kerze Smith and her roommate, pho- rhard Richter, an influen- tographer Robert Mapplethorpe, ontemporary German art- and this intimacy can be seen ichter is most notable for through the cover photo - there's hotorealistic paintings in an odd sense of vulnerability and h he emulates the imperfec- grace present in Radio Ethiopia's of photography - the blur album art that perfectly matches notion shot, the scratched the emotional frailty present in ty of damaged negatives the album and the album's ballad, ng careful brushstrokes. "Pissing in a River." mage of the candle on Day- Album art is important not only Nation, then, presents the to our immediate first impression a's music visually, where of an album, but to the way in Youth's purposeful, some- which we interact with the album messy dissonance parallels as well, listen after listen. If it with Richter's ability to weren't for Pink Floyd's cover art ire the imperfections of pho- for Wish You Were Here, which phy on purpose. depicts two businessmen shaking other notable piece is the hands, one bursting into flames, 'of Sticky Fingers by The would the song "Have a Cigar" be nearly as affecting? And similarly, album covers themselves can Visual art's become so iconic that we look at them and are instantly transport- ace in popular ed to the aural pathways of the music itself. For me, the garishly MUSIC, colorful cover of Magical Mystery Tour by The Beatles instantly takes me to the hot-green fields of ng Stones. The album's "Strawberry Fields Forever." orable photograph of a man's The visual and the auditory jeans - complete with a are deeply intertwined in music in the groin region -was albums. Even with the advent of aived by Andy Warhol, the the MP3 and iTunes cover flow, it minent pop artist of the still might be a better idea to go and '70s. Sticky Fingers's out and buy the physical CD or 'reverberates with Warhol's LP just to be able to flip through ture penchant for turning the liner notes and get the full undane or odd into the musical experience. While music c, from soup cans to car might be great, and art might be es. On Sticky Fingers, we memorable, when the two are an embarrassing, if not com- paired together, a whole new lace happening emblazoned experience erupts from the scene. e of the best rock albums of And why would you choose to me. It seems like the band have one without the other? She was involved in a botched drug deal with Justin Feagin. 'Sorority' sorrow Big surprise: Sororities and horror are an awful combination By SHERI JANKELOVITZ Daily Arts Writer "SororityRow"is amovieofsuchstunningawfulness that it has to be seen to be believed. Actually, on second thought, there is absolutely no reason for anyone to 7) ever see this movie, unless you just want to hang your head sadly over $0wnty the state of horror films today. Row The story features five sorority girls who are such broad caricatures At Quality16 that names really aren't necessary, and Showcase as they can effectively be identified Summit with one-word character traits - either slutty, bitchy or goody-goody. The five ladies (led by Bitchy) attempt to play a prank on an unsuspecting boy, involving faking the death of one of their fellow sisters (Audrina Partridge of TV's "The Hills," who is far more convincing as a corpse than a real person). After dragging out this unfunny prank for far too long, the poor sister is murdered with a tire iron and the other five girls make the world's stu- pidest decision: to dump the body down a mineshaft and pretend it never happened. Have none of them seen "I Know What You Did Last Summer?" That would make them a pretty rare breed in the world of Greek life. And wouldn't you know it: Eight months later, there's suddenly a serial killer stalking the girls with a heavily modified (read: covered in really sharp shit) tire iron. Rather than go straight to the police (as they should've done long before) the girls decide to engage in behavior that, for anyone who's ever seen a horror movie or just existed as a human being, is downright stupid. In particular, nobody should ever wander off in the dark while asking, "Hello? Is anyone there?" That's a sure way to get killed. The film also features not one, but two moments in which someone snaps at the other girls to stop moping about the murders and just go "back to the party!" The sisters seem far more preoccupied with party- ing and drinking than the fact that they murdered a friend. With portrayals like this, it's no wonder soror- ity girls get a bad rap. The film is visually quite hard to look at, making the experience all the more painful to sit through. Each scene seems to have been shot with a weird sort of graininess, which makes no sense in an era when even the crappiest films are shot in crystal-clear HD. The poor visuals simply make it harder to care about any of the characters, seeing as the viewer can hardly tell who is who. The sisters' boyfriends, in particular, all seem to resemble each other, making it hard to tell which collar-popped douche is getting stabbed with the tire iron. To compete with other films of the same ilk, "Soror- ity Row" has to find a way to creatively kill off its main characters. Sadly, most of the time the tire iron is sim- ply shoved into different body parts, complete with gooey sound effects. Ho-hum, been there, done that. But redeemingly, this may be the only horror film in which one of the leads is killed by a flare gun while wrestling in massive amounts of bubble bath. Of course, the killer in this movie turns out to be See SORORITY ROW, Page 10 rying to get at an unsettling 1 experience to advertise bum, and, in fact, it sold the nts very well. Want to illustrate the album cover of the soundtrack to Pow's life? E-mail her at poww@umich.edu. HPV Fct: You boyfr H PV-h A strangely enjoyable 'Hospice' By JOSH BAYER tially seem to laze by on sparse Daily MusicEditor frameworks unveil themselves to be lush fever dreams. Hospice is an album's album. During an impromptu listen to And it could easily be the downer the seven-minute "Atrophy," Sil- of the year. Stark- berman's vaguely violent lyrics ly chronicling a about castration threats and glass man's angst as * bullets take center stage while the he watches his ambient acoustics passively lull wife empire from by. But with headphones and some bone cancer in Hospice time, it becomes clear the music is the'Sloan Ketter- Frenchkiss anything but an afterthought or injg Cancer Ward, a vessel for Silberman's gutting the record is an poetry. The album is like a "Magic epic poem - an abstract narrative Eye" book for depressives, harbor- pieced together through cutting ing dormant melodies in wintry stream-of-consciousness imagery studio murk and icy guitar feed- with raw confessional lyrics. back that doesn't whine so much Establishing a clear-cut protag- as it weeps. onist and immersing the listener in It's Hospice's largely funereal what is essentially his nightmare, pace that makes its erratic sonic Hospice boasts a narrative ambi- booms all the more rewarding. tion that is incredibly refreshing in The album is all about context today's let's-be-cute indie world. and juxtaposition, clambering The lyrics possess a standalone along with a nervous energy of quality and truly deserve their unpredictability, using its wint- own rating (and CliffsNotes). ing restraint as a loaded spring for Musically, Hospice is built like a its louder, more upbeat moments. pressure cooker. Slapping togeth- The surges of straightaway rock er chiming, straightforward pop during the choruses of "Sylvia" with avant-garde tangents and and "Bear" are ejaculatory when melodies shoe-hazed by glitch sandwiched between the sleepy and drone, the album assumes wallow of warped dirges ("Wake") a hauntingly unstable swagger and swirling ambiance ("Thir- that chafes icily with the pro- teen"). tagonist's desperation. Intricate "Kettering" builds an uncanny melodies and arrangements sulk pressure while Silberman sings deep in the mix, wisping around about a significant other being frontman Peter Silberman's amor- hooked up to tubes "singing mor- phous tenor like a dense fog. Upon phine alarms out of tune" in a repeated listens, songs that ini- velvety falsetto croon laced sinis- that cau terly with a subtle sexual menace that clashes uncomfortably with the grim lyrics. When Silberman warbles "they told me that there was no saving you" over the song's sparsely unnerving piano line, there's a spine-chilling beatbefore the track explodes cathartically into a well-earned heat chamber of buzzing guitars, crackly drums and ethereal shoegaze swoons. The entire album functions on these unstable cycles of emotion, both lyrically and musically. With such drab subject matter, Hospice could've easily wound up an overcooked pot of mawkishly earnest doom and gloom. But Sil- berman manages a stabbing brand of dark humor that keeps the album from taking itself too seri- ously without ever compromis- ing its bite. Lines like "and all the while I'll know we're fucked and not getting un-fucked soon" tread an impeccably uncomfortable line See THE ANTLERS, Page 10 There's somethi; It _ 1, y.