Hikaru Utada – Time & Darenimo Iwanai | Single Review

Art that has found its way to the public during a pandemic inevitably takes on a whole new meaning. Hikaru Utada’s latest two singles, per usual, had been created as commercial assignments, but by the time they were released, their shared message of living life in the moment refreshingly resonated with those of us who found ourselves stuck at home and increasingly losing a sense of time. Both songs, co-produced by Nariaki Obukuro, evoke the sounds of Utada’s past work, but they could not be more different in their storytelling approaches.

“Time,” on the surface a standard lovelorn-anthem-made-for-TV-drama Utada fare, is a little puzzle box full of hidden messages. While singing soulfully about turning back time over the sound of a ticking clock on a song called “Time” is not exactly a novelty, there is something about the strategically-placed distorted vocals and the kick drum going offbeat every so often that hints at a subterranean shift. And then there it is — after traveling through a wormhole in the bridge, the song is turned inside out in a spectacularly meta fashion. Not only are we sonically transported back to the playful, breezy sensibility of her early cuts like “Automatic” and “Time Will Tell,” but Utada also breaks the fourth wall and literally implores us to hit the replay button (“Let me give you a spell that can turn back time”) as the music swirls back to the way it was at the beginning of the song again. Time might be elastic here, something to be warped and twisted at our own will, but before we can go back to the start, she reminds us that the only way to live a fulfilled life through the passage of time is to embrace all of our regrets. Time remains linear in reality.

“Darenimo Iwanai” is Sofia Coppola to “Time”’s Christopher Nolan — all of the mood and very little of the structure, which means the fact that it does not crumble under its own weight at any given moment is magical. It plays like a stream of consciousness, going from a recitation of a poem to a casual intellectual discussion to a sex talk in a matter of minutes. Tapping convincingly into the notion that emotional pleasure and carnal desire are intrinsically interlinked is an ambitious task in the confinement of pop music, but Utada achieves it by simply riding the natural ebb and flow of the song. The result is a meditation on human needs that at times sounds coy and grounded and other times incredibly lush, enveloped in a sheen of mystique thanks to jazz-tinged arrangement that is anchored by a plethora of exotic percussion. The final line, “I have to feel things, even feelings I don’t want to feel or else, I’ll lose the ability to feel at all,” is a nugget of wisdom for the ages, but particularly perfect for challenging times like this, when we cannot even identify what we are feeling. This is the kind of music that is made by a seasoned artist who knows what they are doing and clearly has a lot of fun doing it.

It feels wonderful when an artist whose work we have been following for a very long time still continues to surprise us with their growth and unwavering passion to create. We could all use this precious feeling when times get tough, especially now.

C Duncan – Health | Album Review

Judging from the way he looks, no one would be able to tell that Glasgow-based Christopher Duncan is in fact a multi-hyphenate (singer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist among other things) who has been nominated for a Mercury Prize, one of the most prestigious music awards in the UK. Duncan is also a talented visual artist who has hand-painted all of his album artworks, from Glasgow’s aerial view of the Mercury-approved debut, Architect, to his apartment stairwell of the sophomore The Midnight Sun. Featuring an extreme contrast between turquoise and coral, the cover art of his third record, Health, is of what looks like a seaside swimming pool, his most vibrantly-colored image thus far. It succinctly reflects his music at its most accessible and genre-expanding but also, much like Duncan’s unassuming appearance, masks something unexpected and beguilingly rewarding.

Health marks the first time Duncan works with other producers — one of whom is Elbow’s Craig Potter, engineers, and musicians including his professional violinist parents. His Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker-like architectural wizardry and perfectionist tendencies made his first two albums, which he produced and recorded entirely by himself in his bedroom, such quiet revelations in their own rights. Here, his first musical step out into the sunlight makes itself evident the first few notes into the first single, “Impossible,” an irrevocably catchy, jaunty baroque disco number where his tenor, no longer buried in layers of reverbs, sounds as crisp as the see-sawing strings accompanying it. Duncan purposefully allows his songwriting to take center stage: the song could read as his inner monologue about a long-distance relationship as it could an allegory of his creative process (“I gave you wine / Then you went away.”)

Duncan writes extensively about his personal life, relationships, and mortality in Health. The idea of home is, interestingly, a through line of the album, as each of the songs that makes the record’s nucleus explores this concept from its own unique perspective. At its most traditional definition is “Holiday Home,” a luxe matrimonial escape that slinks effortlessly on funky guitar and Duncan’s falsetto, silky and fraying at the edges. “Somebody Else’s Home” takes a more voyeuristic route, imagining grotesque euphoria of gliding across a stranger’s estate, led by a languorous guitar riff that grows louder and more embellished with each repetition.

Sandwiched between the two is the haunting title track, which likens a relationship with an ex-lover to a house and turns it into a flesh-and-blood character. “If our house and avenue / Were to crumble down to the ground / And cover you / And cut into / And nurture you back to health,” Duncan curses at the debris of memories and faintly delivers the title of the song as if it were his last breath. The inherent sweetness of his voice offsets the sinister energy of minor-key piano and pulsing beat to create an authentically bone-chilling effect, a fine balance — which could have easily tipped over into an overbearing territory — that few artists have achieved.

While most of Health emanates ‘70s yacht rock and disco in modern context — some songs more inventively so than others, Duncan, a Royal Conservatoire of Scotland graduate, often incorporates arpeggiated and choral elements of Highland folk music into his composition. Rich imagery and choir-assisted vocals in “He Came from the Sun,” in which Duncan recites his coming-out experience, and the album closer, “Care,” call to mind Sufjan Stevens’s ecclesiastical work. These songs are equipped with emotional punches that other stylishly-arranged numbers lack, and despite slight disproportions and impurities, the album becomes more lushly textured and full of clandestine characteristics because of them. In this sense, Health is a pop record that recontextualizes that strange swimming pool in its cover art. The block of solid-looking body of water is in fact a product of stroke upon stroke of acrylic paints, laboriously smoothed over to make such a glossy surface.

Kacey Musgraves – Golden Hour | Album Review

Crisp blue sky takes more than half the space of Golden Hour’s album cover. Against it is Kacey Musgraves’ face hidden behind a red paper fan, eyes half open, along with a couple of hallucinatory, kaleidoscopic images of her. It’s a stunning — and stunningly simple — visual that encapsulates quiet grace and exuberant, psychedelic colors of the record.

In Golden Hour, everything feels overwhelming but never uneasy; we’re reminded of how small we are in this universe, of how chemical reactions of the mind — love, loneliness, and self-doubt among other things — can be larger than the body that inherits them. The experience is not unlike that of an acid trip from which Musgraves unabashedly shared she got an inspiration. “Mother” starts mid-way through her LSD session and briefly ends with an ellipsis after she utters the song’s title, overcome with emotions. A Tennessee resident, Musgraves contemplates life in Beijing in the pitch-perfect album opener, “Slow Burn,” turning a solemn, autobiographical work on its head and into a drug-fueled cosmic revelation.

Cosmic may also be an apt way to describe Golden Hour’s sonic palette as it constantly ventures into new territories. But Musgraves remains clear-eyed through and through and her work is unmistakably of country genre. Drawling, reverberating sound of pedal steel fills the resigned air of an epic breakup ballad, “Space Cowboy.” In “Butterflies,” banjo is paired with synths and her earnest vocal is filtered through a vocoder (à la Imogen Heap) to narrate a turbulent journey to find love. “High Horse” gallops on disco beat and leaves many recent similar attempts to bring Nashville to pop radio in the dust. This is Musgraves’ brand of country music: it’s so spacious and freeing that embracing the sounds outside of the genre doesn’t feel like an effort.

And it’s this ease that makes Golden Hour a prolonged natural high. Euphoria sounds outsize and even the slightest melancholy is deeply felt when the mind is open to all that this wonderful world has to offer. The sky is big and blue and it’s beautiful indeed.

Taylor Swift – Delicate | Music Video Review

Spike Jonze. That’s the first thing that I — and I’m sure those who are familiar with the auteur’s extensive portfolio of music videos and commercial spots — think of when watching Taylor Swift’s “Delicate” video. Jonze’s protagonist breaks into an explosive dance routine, more often than not when in solitude in a lavish setting. It’s this juxtaposition of extreme cathartic act against the backdrop in which formality is expected that makes for high-concept yet viscerally fun visuals. The image of Christopher Walken walking on air in Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice” video was instantly iconic in early 2000s and still remains so.

This video marks Taylor Swift’s fourth consecutive collaboration with Joseph Kahn in her reputation era. “Look What You Made Me Do” video is an excellent, persona-murdering Pandora’s box of a music video that set sky-high expectations for the album and catapulted the song to the level of success it shouldn’t have been able to afford. Swift fights a robot and flies high with her international crews in her flashy, futuristic subsequent videos, all in the name of shaping up and defending her post-public shaming, new-found reputation. “Delicate” video, in all its subtlety and contemporary aesthetic, however, surpasses its predecessors at conveying the concept of reputation by removing it from the equation: what if Taylor Swift was not famous?

The fifth track of reputation, “Delicate” is the first time that Swift, who has so far in the record appeared unbothered by her tainted image, lyrically admits that her reputation might in fact affect her romantic prospect. On Max Martin’s warm bed of synths and tropical house beat à la Drake, Swift periodically punctuates the chorus with a question, “Isn’t it?” It externalizes so economically and effectively the doubt that comes from the realization that fame has infiltrated her personal life and because of this alone, is one of reputation’s best songs in my opinion. This nuance is beautifully transcribed to the video which sees superstar Taylor Swift — wary of unintentionally drawing attention to herself with every move, quite literally — become magically invisible after receiving a mysterious note. Swift’s dancing with no abandon, though not entirely original compared to Jonze’s videos, works flawlessly here in the context of pop music video that, generally speaking, needs an engaging storyline. What we as an audience already know about Swift (that she’s a mega-celebrity who steadfastly treasures her privacy) is utilized in the video’s first few seconds so well that although we’ve seen her dance like nobody’s watching before, Swift’s impressive, awkwardly joyous performance here feels new as it carries a deeper degree of vulnerability and pathos. Kahn, whose understated direction here is a welcome surprise and whose monopolized tenure this era has refreshingly never once featured a love interest onscreen, lights Swift up like a Broadway star dancing through her three-act arc, from the artificial warmth of luxurious hotel to the coldness of subway train to the catharsis and romance of the downpour. If Jonze’s work is known for out-of-left-field, art-house aesthetic, Swift and Kahn’s is its heart-on-sleeve, mainstream counterpart. Taylor Swift might not be able to fly like Christopher Walken, but in these few dreamy, magical minutes between the first and final close-up shots that mirror each other, it’d be totally believable if she did.

I, Tonya & Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri | Mini Movie Reviews

I, Tonya

“Everyone has their own truth,” utters Margot Robbie’s Tonya Harding near the film’s bloody end, which seems fitting in the era of alternative facts we now live in. No one is a reliable narrator in this biopic (which is also, strangely, a comedy) chronicling Tonya’s early life that constantly endured abuses up until the attack of Nancy Kerrigan, which ended Tonya’s figure skating career and left her the then most hated woman in America. While a few points it tries to make suffer from its hodgepodge structure and pacing issue, the film, with Robbie’s stellar performance as Tonya in a perpetual survival mode, provides an unflinching portrait of Americans living in poverty and the American dream they can never afford.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

The female empowerment that leads our current collective consciousness is what likely pushes this revenge fantasy to a Best Picture frontrunner status. Frances McDormand, as sublime as ever, plays Mildred Hayes who unleashes her rage upon the local authority that has failed to provide her justice after her daughter was raped and murdered. Martin McDonagh’s screenplay and direction wondrously hopscotch from poignancy to violence to laugh-out-loud hilarity in a single scene at a matter of seconds and do so multiple times. Though, McDonagh (who is Irish)’s depiction of American racial issue, which is ignorant at best and offensive at worst, may prove to be the film’s Achilles’ heel.

Call Me by Your Name & Your Name | Mini Movie Reviews

Call Me by Your Name

Love is visceral and life-defining in Call Me by Your Name. Luca Guadagnino’s visions of the picturesque northern Italy, the runny yolk of a soft-boiled egg hastily cracked open, and the droplets of sweats on slender bodies ooze with desires and sensuality. Starting out frustratingly undefined, Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer)’s love grows in size it consumes their identities, punctuated by the magical words, “Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine.” Even at its most devastating — there are few close-up shots in film history more well-acted than the film’s finale, love is a sight to behold.

Your Name

Love is a universal concept, but good love stories don’t necessarily transcend cultures. In Japanese dramas, a too-cool-for-school, world-weary male and a rebellious, plucky female always find their ways to each other somehow. Your Name is not subverting these tropes so much as weaving them with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-esque sci-fi elements: the film’s leads swap bodies and time-travel over and over again just so that they don’t forget the other’s name. It’s unapologetically Japanese, both narratively and visually, yet so accessible and effective because it asks a universal question, “what are we without the memories of our loved ones?”

Lady Bird & The Shape of Water | Mini Movie Reviews

Lady Bird

Coming-of-age movies rely on how universally resonating the protagonists’ experiences are, so it’s delightfully surprising how Greta Gerwig, who operates on her own quirky wavelength as an actress, expands her artistic vision and pulls off her directorial debut so perfectly. The way the emotional pivotal scenes are edited with no more fanfares than the awkwardly hilarious trivial moments makes the journey of the titular Lady Bird, an unexceptional teenage girl who longs for a life beyond her socioeconomic status, genuinely moving and well, exceptional. All the characters and their hometown of Sacramento are portrayed in all their beauties and flaws, which are impossible to shine through without the love people in front of and behind the camera pour into them.

The Shape of Water

Fantasy movies need heroes to fight against the evil, and perhaps none have been treated by the filmmakers as lovingly as Sally Hawkins’ Elisa, a mute cleaning lady who falls in love with an oceanic creature captured in an experimental facility she works at. An unlikely heroine of an unlikely film that drives home a point about minority people’s experiences in America, Hawkins gives a full-body performance that makes her small, slender frame and exaggerated facial features the centerpiece of the dreamy steampunk aesthetics and the masterfully choreographed cinematography. Look at her embracing the lover of another species in teal-colored water, a red shoe falling off her foot; this is modern-day Cinderella.

The Florida Project & The Killing of a Sacred Deer | Mini Movie Reviews

The Florida Project

At the edge of dreams is where filmmaker Sean Baker tells his stories. His last movie, Tangerine, made the daily hustle of two trans sex workers look so much like a heroic fantasy that the fact that it took place in Hollywood felt almost irrelevant. This time, Baker turns his microscopic lens to low-income residents of motels near the dreamland of Disney World. The kitschy motels, filmed lovingly against the blue sky, are a big playground for the cast of little kids, led by the endlessly cute Brooklynn Prince. It’s yet another stunning fantasy where innocence is never lost.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer

This tale of violence inflicted upon the innocent transcribes its high concept quite literally. Like in The Lobster and Dogtooth, auteur Yorgos Lanthimos skillfully showcases his trademark maneuver of grotesque narrative and deadpan humor in this straight-up horror movie about a heart surgeon (Colin Farrell) who finds his wife (Nicole Kidman) and children at death sentences at the wrath of a mysterious teenager (Barry Keoghan). The tension is so incredibly suffocating from start to finish that the unthinkable brutality at its climax feels like mercy.

I Went to See Lana Del Rey on My 30th Birthday

I decided to go to Lana Del Rey’s concert in San Francisco on the day I turned 30. This piece of information solicited two kinds of reactions: the “Aw you must like her so much” and the “But I guess you’d want to throw a big birthday party too.” Neither was necessarily true about me — first, I like Lana’s music but wouldn’t call myself a big fan anymore; second, I’m relatively new to the city and found the idea of gathering a handful of friends I have on a Tuesday night after Labor Day weekend exhausting. I just wanted to get in touch with myself with the help of the music that I’ve enjoyed over the past few years.

It’s interesting that, of all people, it’s Lana Del Rey whom I’d spend the last few hours of my 20’s with. Lana Del Rey occupies this rare space in the music world, an artist whose image — the old Hollywood beauty dubbed “gangsta Nancy Sinatra” who falls for bad, moneyed, older guys — is so out of the left field, yet who somehow enjoys mainstream success. So much has been said earlier about her authenticity, from her well-connected wealthy father to her musicianship to her lips, that so many times it threatened to derail her career. Lana has been known as a walking performance art piece, and walk she does — you’d be hard-pressed to find anything on the airwaves resembling her music, let alone anything this wildly successful.

In 2011, I stumbled on a blog post about her live performance on a UK variety show, thinking to myself while squinting at a blurry thumbnail of her face, “I didn’t know Natalie Portman was a recording artist.” 24-year-old me was so transfixed by her sounds and visuals, sending myself down a rabbit hole of vintage video montages and unreleased demos. On a crowded train with my earphones on, gazing out to Tokyo’s skyline at dusk, I’d mouth the lyrics of Summertime Sadness way before it was released as a single and became a top 10 hit. I remember being disappointed later by the follow-ups like Ultraviolence and Honeymoon because of the lack of hooks and dramatic productions that I came to love. My relationship with Lana has never been deeper than whatever I can hear or see. Even at the height of the controversy around her credibility as an artist — her notoriously disastrous Saturday Night Live performance, I couldn’t have cared less about it all, about how the sausage got made; I just knew I liked the damn sausage. I fell in and out of love with her several times based purely on my sensory judgement on her work. So was the fact that I’d see her live for the first time on my 30th birthday, the beginning of the new chapter of my life — or so people say, going to force me to scrutinize her more profoundly and reflect whatever I might find upon myself? Was this by mistake or design?

As I walk toward the line outside Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, I let the thought that this concert might mean something to me spiritually hang in the back of my mind and tried to not expect anything at all, skipping my usual pre-show ritual of checking out the setlist and bombarding my ears with the artist’s music. I allowed myself to be surprised by anything; it worked. My eyes widened in amusement as these flower crown-wearing young men and women hurriedly shuffled past the gate, again from my seat on the balcony as their arms flailed toward her direction in unison like a giant snake slithering through the crowd, and again through a monitor at their gleeful faces as she got off the stage to greet them after the show. This is one of the most passionate concert-goers I’ve ever seen.

But what surprised me the most, of course, was Lana Del Rey, so much so that I’d occasionally find my mouth slightly gaping open in surprise as I watched her perform. “Perform” sounded like the perfect word to describe what Lana constantly does as an artist who has this big, bold persona to maintain, and whether I knew it or not, I might have subconsciously anticipated her to “perform” her set. What I witnessed, instead, was the ease in everything she did, from gliding around the stage on her stilettos to doing some light choreography with two dancers. There’s this unmistakably nihilistic essence to her singing — switching between nonchalantly twisting the notes and selectively attempting to hit ones with which she’s pleased. Listening to it, I felt like I was temporarily freed from the weight of the expectations I put on myself, the echo chamber of life in San Francisco — the city where its residents’ collective ambitions are all-consuming like the fog that perpetually engulfs it. In those moments in a packed auditorium, just like when I silently sang along to her songs in a Tokyo train, it’s as if these words were in the language that was foreign to everyone else, meaning so much to just me all the while managing to say next to absolutely nothing. Regardless of how absurd (Body Electric’s “Elvis is my daddy / Marilyn’s my mother / Jesus is my bestest friend”) or socially aware (lyrics of Change) the lyrics were, they rolled out of her mouth like smoke, carrying no venom or irony, just shifting their shapes to the melodies. I was reminded of how I used to and apparently still think that Ride’s first verse has the most gorgeous melody ever. They were the comforting I didn’t know I needed.

On my way out of the concert hall, feeling content that I’d been able to see Lana Del Rey in the flesh, I still didn’t know who she was or had any intention to find out. Although she remained as enigmatic to me as ever, this ethereal being looked supremely comfortable being exactly that. One minute she sang about being a groupie in love with a rock star and the next about how she wanted to become a better citizen of the world — her silhouette casting over a backdrop of a mushroom-shaped explosion; she did not try to justify her choices and just showed up to do what she had to do. The next morning, the first day of my 30s, a thought popped up to say hi like an old friend, “Am I enough?” I shrugged it off and got ready.

Lorde – Melodrama | Album Review

Lorde was never meant to be a star. Royals, her breakthrough hit was an antithesis to excessive materialism that overcrowded the pop radio, and Pure Heroine, the debut album that housed it similarly found her wearing teenage ennui and uncool lifestyle in her New Zealander suburban hometown like a badge of honor. But now that, ironically, the outsider has become a bona fide international pop star, where does she go from here? Does she join the zeitgeist she used to criticize or does she continue to be an anomaly whose cavalier attitude helps sell records?

Lorde seems less interested in answering those questions than in making an album on her own term — something she can afford to do now with commercial success under her belt. A self-proclaimed pop music consumer who reveres the art and science behind the craft, Lorde has always been an extremely gifted songwriter, deftly constructing lyrics with economical, unforced diction to vividly convey both universally relatable messages and personal specifics. And so she gathers materials from her newly embraced lifestyle as a famous adolescent and love for what she is doing and sets off on a new journey called Melodrama.

Compared to Pure Heroine’s car ride on tarmac streets, the journey of Melodrama feels intergalactic. It chronicles millennial life in all its glorious and shameful details, the scope so expansive it needs to be accompanied by relatively loud production from fun.’s and Bleachers’ Jack Antonoff, who is behind moderate pop hits such as Taylor Swift’s Out of the Woods. Yet true to her minimalistic root, Lorde frames the larger-than-life narrative in a single house party, circling through the arcs of having fun, falling in love, getting heartbroken, reflecting on self, and growing. All of these, like life itself, are not explored in a streamlined manner, and the iconoclastic disarray is perhaps Melodrama’s best attribute. Green Light tears into the speakerphone with fiery vengeance — Lorde breaks the lyrical rhyme by calling her ex a “liar” with snide panache, before she declares, “But I hear sounds in my mind / Brand new sounds in my mind,” over a house piano-driven key change that literally introduces new sounds to the song. As dramatic and jarring as it sounds, such sonic shift allows her to effectively pivot her songwriting perspective within a song. The first part of the six-minute-long dual track Hard Feelings/Loveless sees Lorde stare deep into her post-breakup wreckage and find the will to move on in solitude — the conflicting feelings echoed through creaking and clanking metal sound effects. The remaining two minutes, in sharp contrast, are all about going wide: Lorde, in sing-songy taunting voice, labels her generation as affectionless abusers who get high on emotionally torturing their lovers. In the album’s standout, The Louvre, her worldview is covered in pastel-colored sheen of us-against-the-world young love, but as the romance builds to its feverish peak, Lorde breaks the fourth wall saying, “Broadcast the boom boom boom boom / And make ‘em all dance to it,” and collaborators Flume and Malay begin descending the beat underwater. The song slinks beautifully between heart-on-a-string sentiment swirling inside her chest and hip-hop cool that she projects outward, before riding warm, swelling guitar off into the sunset.

Even amidst an overwhelming emotional rush, “I get caught up, just for a minute,” Lorde sings, as self-aware as she has ever been. A party, she says, is a mental exercise so she keeps her eyes open, her senses sharpened, and her pop sensibility intact throughout. At the height of the night, she knowingly commits to “blowing shit up” in the Tove Lo-assisted irrevocably catchy Homemade Dynamite and in Sober, observes the party like she would a ritual on an exotic tropical island: “These are the games of the weekend / We pretend that we just don’t care but we care.” Moments after the party dies down that leave Lorde by herself result in some of the most refreshing introspection without falling into ponderous self-indulgence. In Liability, she carves an empathetic message about self-love out of the personal turmoil that comes with fame, while Supercut is as very much breezy and perfect for the summer as it is honest at exploring inner peace and acceptance.

The fact that everything in the album conceptually takes place in a confined space of a party does not stop Melodrama from turning out to be a full-fledged coming-of-age journey that bursts at its seams in rich colors. And although collective pronoun “we” is still used as much as before, it is imbued with a greater sense of self, more pathos, and less camaraderie here than in Pure Heroine. Melodrama’s essence is perfectly encapsulated in the euphoric chorus of the final track, Perfect Places: Lorde’s layered voices, each of which represents different point in the emotional spectrum, soar and explode like fireworks. The album ends with a question, “What the fuck are perfect places anyway?” It is fitting not only in the context of a party but also because regardless of how old we are, don’t we all, in some shape or form, ask this question to ourselves and search for the answer everyday? On this never-ending journey that we all sign up for, Lorde shows that the answer does not matter as much as — and that the best can come out of — the act of searching.