The Michigan Daily - Monday, June 14, 2004 - 11
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I'm a Barbie girl in a Barbie wo-orld!
'Stepford' disgusts
By Raquel Laneni
Daily Arts Writer
Dating tip # 3947: Take your sweetheart on a date in the stark, beautiful wilderness of British Columbia.
By Aexadra Jones
Daily ArtsEditor
Mus ic REVI EW * **
Carl "A.C." Newman has done the
unthinkable, but not the unexpected:
He's created The Slow Wonder, a near-
immaculate album
that effortlessly A.C Newman
shifts in tone from
power-pop chant to The Slow
bittersweet, laid- Wonder
back confessional
to rock-driven Matador
anthem. The pri-
mary songwriter for Canadian super-
group the New Pornographers,
Newman proves that even without his
cohorts, he's a master of pop music with
an album that's so much more than
bouncy hooks and catchy choruses.
The Slow Wonder opens with the
kind of song that can turn lives around:
"Miracle Drug" begins with syncopated
drumbeats, then a rigid guitar hits "and
1" while Newman belts out, "He was
tied to the bed with a miracle drug in
one hand." After the first chorus, a
glowing, fantastically taut guitar solo
strains against - but fits perfectly into
- the rhythmic framework, its writhing
energy enhanced by barely-audible syn-
thesizer beeps.
Although "Miracle Drug" might be
the most perfectly crafted pop song this
year, its primary contender is "On the
Table," The Slow Wonder's alternately
cute and driving third track. Here, the
compositional savvy that made New-
man's songwriting for the New Pornog-
raphers so gorgeous shows clearly. He
still densely stacks instrumental lines,
but instead of the synthesized layers in
much of his previous work, Newman
plays it cool with a more pointillist
approach, interlocking guitar and
rhythm lines.
He's also sparing the keyboards on
The Slow Wonder. Instead of building
off of a substratum of keyboard lines,
each element receives special treatment
to create a whole that's worth far more
than the sum of its parts: The chiming
urgency of straightforward rock piano
is indeed the soul of "On the Table,"
creating something as close to pure joy
as can be found on plastic. Who knew
repeated eighth notes had such soul-
moving power?
Incorporated into this meticulous.
the slow wonder
AC, NEWMAN
instrumental mix is Carl Newman's
casual, pretty voice, sliding deliciously
easily between straightforward tone and
a falsetto that'll shiver your spine. Now
Newman doesn't have a "hot boy voice"
(think Death Cab for Cutie vocalist Ben
Gibbard's bedroom tenor), but some-
thing in his lilting, matte-finish timbre
creates an honesty, a closeness that
lends his sometimes-standoffish lyrics
deeper meaning. On sweeter, more deli-
cate songs like "Come Crash" and
"Drink to Me, Babe, Then," you get the
feeling that if Newman were singing to
you, he'd be staring at some distant spot
on the wall or down at his own feet.
But The Slow Wonder's not a shy kid;
even on the sensitive, intimate tracks,
laid-back strumming and bardic cho-
ruses are punctuated by slashing guitar
punches and the occasional synth
swoop. "Come Crash" is a love song
that depicts the events of only one
night, but the dialogue between its two
characters tells all about their relation-
ship. "She plants one kiss for the road
on my chest ... / Christine, come crash
on my floor," Newman's character
sings; she counters with "'We should be
dead / We should be stars and perfect
tens / And that's just three off the top of
my head,"' later adding "I should be
sleeping in your bed / Instead, I'll
crash on your floor." The verbal
"crash" is punctuated four beats later
with cymbal and snare roll and a dia-
bolical guitar hook.
While none of the tracks on The Slow
Wonder bounce with the same candy-
cocaine energy of many New Pornogra-
phers songs, Newman hasn't abandoned
the ideas that drove his songwriting for
the group: "The Town Halo" could fit
easily on the New Pornographers' 2003
album Electric Version.
Newman keeps us interested
through the album's all-too-brief 33-
minute runtime - The Slow Wonder's
only fault is that it's so short --
although by the closer, "35 in the
Shade," he has forgone a few of the
uber-catchy hooks of "Miracle Drug"
and "Secretarial" in favor of larger
musical contour in individual songs:
The primary drive of "Come Crash"
is depiction of the tense, post-trauma
scene, and "The Cloud Prayer" aban-
dons hooks for soulful brass texture
and hopeful, childlike lyrics.
The poet William Carlos Williams
once said that a poem is a machine
made of words. If that's so, each song
on The Slow Wonder is a machine made
of sound, a device that creates not only
enjoyment in listeners, but assists in a
process of bodily levitation brought on
by music, lifting listeners off the
ground with a mix of heady emotion
and broad vision.
In the same way a poem isn't just a
verbal equation, words jammed togeth-
er in hopes of creating precision on
paper, Newman's first solo effort isn't
simply a jumble of vibrant guitar solos,
poppy beats and piano banging. With
the most basic music elements, The
Slow Wonder works miracles on the
mind with each track - 11 little fastid-
iously crafted musical machines.
In the self-proclaimed "male fanta-
sy" world of Stepford, the first thing
the audience sees
- and that new- i'
comer Walter The Stepford
(Matthew Brod- Wives
erick) sees as he At Showcasel
drives by in his Paramount Picturesl
car - is a
blonde woman
with perky breasts, wearing a flow-
ered dress and dangerously high
heels, checking the mail. The camera
then cuts to Walter's wife Joanna (an
unglamorous, brunette Nicole Kid-
man) passed out, open-mouthed, in
the passenger's seat.
Frank Oz's remake of '70s sci-
fi/horror film "The Stepford Wives"
falsely claims to be a witty comedy
and social satire, but it's filled with
lame one-liners and is so overdone
that it loses any discernable point.
Joanna enjoys life as a television
producer, specializing in reality
shows until an incident involving a
cast member gets her fired. She suf-
fers an anxiety attack, and she and
her husband decide that their soul-
sucking careers are ruining their rela-
tionship and distancing them from
their children.
The solution: move to Stepford,
Connecticut, the Brave New World of
suburbia. But something's not quite
right about this town populated by
nerds and their hot homemaker
wives, like when the fembots mal-
function and shoot sparks out occa-
sionally - Are they robots or do they
merely have microchips installed in
their brains? The film can't seem to
decide.
What prevents the film from tak-
ing a stance on feminism is its lack of
subtlety. The Stepford wives are hot
Martha Stewarts without the market-
ing savvy. They only talk about
housekeeping, crafts and baking -
and about what amazing sex they
have with their husbands. Perhaps if
the wives acted with the same sub-
servience, but with a broader range of
conversational topics - what male
wants to talk about Christmas decora-
tions with his wife - it would have
more of a cautionary tone because of
its not-so-blatant misogyny.
Of course, these gaffes could be
forgiven if the film was actually
funny. Paul Rudnick's script is com-
prised of lame zingers that come few
and far between - if you've seen the
trailers, you've pretty much seen all
of them. Joanna's sidekicks - Bette
Midler as a Jewish rebel and Roger
Bart as the "wife" of a gay couple -
provide some laughs and supply the
only performances, despite the all-
star cast, that seem natural in this arti-
ficial film. Kidman and Broderick
show no chemistry whatsoever, and
their scenes together seem painfully
stilted. It doesn't help that the script
requires them to tell the audience all
about their marriage, rather than hav-
ing them show it through action or
gesture.
The few chuckles "The Stepford
Wives" elicits are not enough to
make up for the stiff acting, underde-
veloped characters lacking motiva-
tion and nonsensical plot twists that
abound this dud masquerading as
social commentary.
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