I often question movie directors who feel the need to act in their own films, especially the good ones. The worst part of Quentin Tarantino\u2019s stellar Pulp Fiction is the scene he steps in front of the camera and tries to match acting chops with Keitel, Travolta and Jackson \u2014 it\u2019s like bringing a tricycle to the Tour de France. Spike Lee is a better actor in his films, but not by much. If Mookie died instead of Radio Raheem, that would have been just fine with me.<\/p>\n
The same problems arise when music producers move their names from the liner notes to the album cover (vinyl is not dead in my household). Sometimes it\u2019s a revelation (Dr. Dre, Danger Mouse) and sometimes not so much (Timbaland). For Swedish producing team Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg, Grammy Award winners who\u2019ve worked with Britney Spears, Madonna and Kylie Minogue, the creation of their band Miike Snow has been fodder for the meh list. But the arrival of Happy To You has the duo (with New Yorker and lead singer Andrew Wyatt as the third man in the tripod) moving closer to the yeah list with a 10-song album which is varied and stylish.<\/p>\n
My main quibble is it has too many ideas. There are disco songs and poppy dance numbers, ballads and electronic blips, bells and horns, strings and synths. Wyatt, sounding somewhere between Andrew Vanwyngarden and Peter Gabriel, brings the lyrics to life with his bouncy falsetto.<\/p>\n
Opening track \u201cEnter The Joker\u2019s Lair\u201d is apropos, Wyatt\u2019s voice rises and falls with electronic beeps at the song\u2019s outset, but the track quickly becomes a trip to Super Mario land. I half expected magic mushrooms to fall from the sky. The mood changes with \u201cDevil\u2019s Work,\u201d a sinister song employing stern piano, stabbing synths and haunting horns \u2014 it has a certain weight to it. \u201cGod Help This Divorce\u201d carries this trait despite its lilting, dreamlike exterior \u2014 Wyatt speaks of a bad marriage in stark terms. \u201cShe was a beauty queen,\u201d he coos, \u201cbut I held her down, down, down.\u201d It\u2019s beautiful and dour.<\/p>\n
Happy To You has its stumbles. \u201cPretender\u201d brings back the specter of Haddaway from the song that will not be named, while \u201cBlack Tin Box\u201d is dull and somber \u2014 not even a guest appearance from Lykke Li can save it. Yet the band snaps back up, as the album-ending \u201cPaddling Out\u201d returns a cheerful status to the record, bringing the record to a radiant resolution.<\/p>\n
As star producers who know what works, if Karlsson and Winnberg were not in Miike Snow they would most likely tell Miike Snow to rein it in a bit \u2014 there\u2019s too much here to absorb and it puts the listener in a daze. But the band is not too far from clarity, as amidst the barrage is brilliance. With a smidgen of focus, Miike Snow is primed for starring roles on stages everywhere. And that\u2019s the double-truth, Ruth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I often question movie directors who feel the need to act in their own films, especially the good ones. The worst part of Quentin Tarantino\u2019s stellar Pulp Fiction is the scene he steps in front of the camera and tries to match acting chops with Keitel, Travolta and Jackson \u2014 it\u2019s like bringing a tricycle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1253,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[336,335],"class_list":["post-1252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-happy-to-you","tag-miike-snow"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1252"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1254,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252\/revisions\/1254"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}