6 — Friday, February 21, 2020 Arts The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com WHISPER SUBMIT A WHISPER By Jeffrey Wechsler ©2020 Tribune Content Agency, LLC 02/21/20 Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis 02/21/20 ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE: Release Date: Friday, February 21, 2020 ACROSS 1 “... morning roses newly wash’d with __”: Petruchio 4 Jacket stories 8 Caused trepidation 14 Phoenix-to- Albuquerque dir. 15 O’Neill’s daughter 16 “Happy Days” diner namesake 17 Networking technology 19 Jalopy sound 20 Offering in shellfish worship? 22 Mississippi sight 23 Storage furniture 24 “__-haw!” 25 Expanse 26 Word often preceded by a leader’s name 29 Shellfish massage? 35 Perfect place 37 “Modern Family,” e.g. 38 Good name for a budget shellfish dealer? 42 “Catch you later” 43 Traditional knowledge 44 Rate for records, briefly 47 High spirits 50 Hit the big time 52 Like one who exchanges texts with a shellfish? 55 One of an infant’s pair 56 Sore application 57 City adjoining Champaign, Illinois 58 Began, as a co. 59 Fourth bk. of the Jewish Torah 60 U.S. IOUs 61 Relative of -ity 62 Fast sports cars DOWN 1 With intensity 2 Dinner menu item 3 Merchant’s assurance during a sale 4 Carried 5 They’re charged 6 Land parcel size 7 Bag with a strap 8 Bollywood costumery 9 Modeling, say 10 They’re not with you 11 Uniform education org.? 12 Bardot was on its cover at age 14 13 Golfing pres. 18 Lea grazer 21 __ admiral 25 “Don’t delay!” letters 26 Taking parts of 27 Early initials in American cars 28 Certain limb 30 News agcy. since 1958 31 __City: computer game 32 In __: actual 33 YouTube star __ Marie Johnson 34 Honda FourTrax, e.g.: Abbr. 35 Very active port? 36 Genesis pronoun 39 Baldwin of “30 Rock” 40 Closed 41 Vet’s concern, perhaps 45 Like many hobby shop mat boards 46 Surfing equipment 47 Hint 48 Dior design 49 Some big box stores 50 Neuters 51 Canadian Thanksgiving mo. 52 Well-used 53 Vagrant 54 “Dang!” 55 Objection CLASSIFIEDS 734-418-4115 option 2 dailydisplay@gmail.com 5 BDRM HOUSE Fall 2020 511 Linden - $4,000 Washer/Dryer 2 Pking Spaces Tenant pay all Utilities 734-996-1991 LARGE 3 BED APT 119 E. 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MUSIC REVIEW DAILY ENTERTAINMENT COLUMN ‘And It’s Still Alright’ is stripped-back and cliche Looking back at the brutal ending to ‘Animorphs’ The struggle between producing content that music consumers want to hear and staying true to the artist’s heart is, and has been, the plight of the singer/songwriter since the genre gained traction. It’s the fine balance every artist struggles with until they finally decide to do what every artist before them has done — release an album that strays far from their traditional sound in an attempt to reach new and profound conclusions. Nathaniel Ratecliff embraces this cliche on And It’s Still Alright, his third solo album. He grapples with his recent divorce and the death of a close friend, dedicating the album to processing the loneliness and sorrow of loss. After breaking into the music scene by belting burly soul music with the Night Sweats, Rateliff has swung to the other extreme of Americana, designing this album to be intimate, confessional and cathartic — everything a Night Sweats album is not. Taking a more stripped back approach, the album focuses on Rateliff’s vocals and acoustic guitar while all other elements (soft strings, muted finger snaps and quiet percussion) seem to fall around the centerpiece. “Time Stands” is a collage of ideas — waiting for true love, mourning a failed relationship and the harshness of passing time — which ultimately creates a meaningless yet profound account of losing the one you love. “Time stands in a duel and I stand for you,” Rateliff bellows over an acoustic guitar backed by a high-pitched organ, as if to create a glimmer of light shining through darkness. The album’s raw aesthetic oddly clashes with its intentions for a close listen. Rateliff mumbles over twangy guitar riffs, producing a vocal performance that lacks any shape or mood. He writes to burrow inward, inviting listeners into that part of himself, but his slurred phrasing and lazy diction contradicts this invitation. The album’s final track, “Rush On,” is one of the more somber tracks on the album, featuring low guitars, a heavy bass drum and Rateliff lethargically stringing together lyrics whose meanings get lost in his long, drawn out mumbling. But Rateliff doesn’t leave the album too somber. The album’s first track, “What A Drag,” is a bluesy, playful tune that contrasts its rather melancholy lyrics. “I left, I left feeling alone / But you can undo it, man,” Rateliff sings with twangy optimism. The album’s title track is also more optimistic in nature with its graceful front porch strides and light, upbeat guitar riffs. While the album is beautiful in its raw, authentic approach to music and the human experience, Rateliff has clearly fallen into the cliche singer- songwriter trap. He uses this album to dig deep into his “real emotions,” but takes an exaggerated step away from his retro, soulful sound with the Night Sweats, overemphasizing how this album is supposed to deliver something different than anything he’s ever written before. Despite this misstep, And It’s Still Alright delivers some heavy emotions with grace, and like much of the folk music we hear today, reminds us of how music can pull us out of our pain and suffering. To an elementary school kid with an insatiable thirst for reading, there was no greater joy than going to the school library. In a way, besides the books in your own home or the books you might occasionally buy from a store, the books contained in a library were all that there was. All the books contained in that school library were books you could find easily, checkout and read. Everything beyond those walls was an enigma, out of reach and out of sight. Libraries, by their very nature, exist a few years behind in terms of their book availability. School libraries even more so. Because of this, in the early 2000s when I was growing up, the library at Wines Elementary School still contained many books from the late 90’s. There were dozens upon dozens of “Boxcar Children,” “Goosebumps,” and “Babysitters Club,” but by far the coolest looking books on the shelf were “Animorphs.” With each cover showing a kid turning into an animal and the scary blurbs on the back warning of an impending alien invasion, those books were basically crying out to be read by sci-fi-minded children. Our library had almost every one of them, books 1-53 and a plethora of spinoffs. All except one. The final book in the series, number 54 “The Beginning,” was nowhere to be found. While kids are certainly curious individuals, they don’t quite have the attention span of adults. And while I certainly wondered how the whole thing was supposed to end, this small mystery, along with most of my memories and feelings about Animorphs in general, faded into the dark recesses of my mind, packaged away with memories of the playground and kindergarten. This past summer I while I was interning in LA, I took a weekend trip to Portland, Oregon to visit some old camp friends I hadn’t seen in years. While there, we went to a used bookstore in the city. Lo and behold, while casually looking through the shelves, I stumbled across the entirety of the Animorphs series, including that elusive final chapter. Memories flooding back to me, I decided it was long overdue that I found out how the whole thing wrapped up. I bought the penultimate book as well so I could re-acquaint myself with the story and threw the two 100 pagers in my backpack for the flight home. How little did I know what was awaiting me… You see, it turns out there was a reason why my children’s library didn’t have the final book in this children’s series. While it could be a mighty coincidence, after reading the end I’m left to assume some adult somewhere decided this was too much for kids and removed it from the library. “Animorphs” was a kids series through and through for much of its run. In every book the heroic “Animorphs” (kids who could turn into animals) would acquire a new “morph” (or animal to turn into), allowing them to solve the problem of the day that usually involved the alien Yeerks who were trying to take over the planet. Nothing much really changed from book to book and the battle with the Yeerks more or less felt like a stalemate designed to last forever and make as much money for publishers as possible. Not so in the last act. In the penultimate novel, Jake, arguably the main character of the series, orders a ton of secondary animorphs to their deaths (all of the animorphs are children, by the way) and then commits an act of genocide by flushing millions of unarmed Yeerks into the cold vacumm of space. Book 53 ends on a cliffhanger, with the conclusion of the war still to come. In 120-page “The Beginning,” the war ends in the second chapter. The rest of the book is about the aftermath. And what a terribly depressing aftermath it is. As the final step in his master plan to defeat the Yeerks, Jake orders his cousin Rachel to her death. Tobias, Rachel’s lover, never forgives Jake and goes to live out the rest of his life in exile. Jake himself suffers from PTSD and is unable to live a normal life, grief- stricken over the things he did in order to win the war. It’s a coda at the end of what had been a relatively breezy series about kids battling aliens that takes a sharp turn into major anti-war writing in the last two books. I got off the plane and felt cold and empty inside. In “Animorphs” there is no “Nineteen Years Later,” no “All was well,” no Ewok celebration or fireworks after the funeral of Tony Stark. There is only war and the pain it inflicts upon all those who take part in it, no matter the righteousness of the cause. These are heavy themes, certainly not ones that I would have understood at age 9. But when I got off that plane my mind was totally blown. I wondered what I would have thought if I had read that book all those years ago. I read the penultimate book and never realized it was setting up Jake as a PTSD-stricken genocidal warmonger, so maybe the events of 54 would have gone over my head as well. Or maybe not. Maybe some other kid, years before me, read number 54 and burst into tears, inconsolable until an adult took the book from their hands, locked it in a dungeon, and made sure no Wines Elementary school student would ever read it again. Whatever the case, for a series that I read fifteen years ago to reach across time and move me today, I have no choice but to give my respects. Not everything needs a happy ending because not everything in life has a happy ending. I don’t know what I would’ve thought of this when I was nine, but as a 21 year old with an uncertain future, I tip my hat to K.A. Applegate, Scholastic Books and all the rest. These were books about kids turning into animals to fight slug aliens. There were trading cards and a crappy TV show on Nickelodeon. “The Beginning” had no right to be such a moving end.had no right to be such a moving end. KAITLYN FOX Daily Arts Writer IAN HARRIS Daily Entertainment Columnist NEON