I can’t imagine how many reviews of Cat Power’s new CD use the title as the heart of their arguments, so please excuse me if it has been done before. Cat Power has at last, after over ten years of recording, found its forte in the aptly titled The Greatest, their most comfortable CD to date.

The confidence and pure soul of this album leads me to believe that the Chan Marshall who offered up nauseatingly nervous live performances was a farce. The woman who turned her back to the audience in order to force a note past her shaking vocal chords, who has stormed off stages in tears, could not have feasibly created a smile in her past, let alone a grouping of songs with this much poise.

The Greatest reveals an ironic use of Marshall’s shy tone; it’s a direct contrast to the strong character which finally tears away its mask. Don’t get me wrong—the songs still paint clear pictures of jealousy-scorned suicide (“Islands”) and failed love attempts (“Living Proof”). Yet the music sounds more settled; regardless of the lyrics, the delivery is hopeful. With the help of Memphis’ legendary Hodges brothers, Marshall even manages to successfully combine Cat Power’s sound with backup singers and an echoing saxophone reminiscent of a ’90s love ballad in the song “Willie.”

Regardless of all the praise, it still might be hard for some past fans to approve of her new sound. The desperation and cloudiness that I liked about Cat Power has been transformed into something more appealing. Marshall has gotten her act together, and for the first time, she offers her audience something comforting: room to breathe.

Clocking in at 35 minutes, The Plastic Constellations’ Crusades is a ten-song disc with a single mindset. Complex guitar riffs, capricious song structures and the occasional hook cause the listener to drift through the CD, almost without noticing when one song ends and the next begins. The only problem: They all start to sound the same after about 15 minutes.

A local success story, the Plastic Constellations have been playing and recording together since high school. They garnered national recognition with their second release, 2004’s Mazatlan. In their music, fast guitars meet unintelligible lyrics in a way that’s not quite prog rock and not quite punk.

Crusades, as far as I can tell, is a modern-day mythology, giving the nod of the cap to Don Quixote (see the song of the same name) and simultaneously to the band’s Midwestern roots (“But for the rest, we’re just stuck in East St. Paul / We never rest, we skip spring and summer, head straight to the fall”). My grievance is that most of this is lost in the yelps and wails through which the words are delivered.

In the end, Crusades is a steady, homogenous album with few stand out moments. The Plastic Constellations are a talented group of musicians, but they need to move outside their comfort zone if they want to avoid stagnation and predictability.

The undulating waters and serene sand-scape provide a breathtaking backdrop for this poetic tribute to the maxi-pad.

“Beach Towels” by Paul McCartney – $3,000

Oh, don’t worry, Ringo, it’s really simple. Just click on that little icon there and drag it to the trash. Now let’s never speak of this again.

“Help” by Ringo Starr – $2,000, on SALE for $1,650

Pretty much my favorite band…bred for their skills in magic.

“Generations” by John Entwistle – $950

I love movies. That’s why I truly enjoy writing about them. Yes, there are many bad movies out there, but part of what I love is that every once in a while, a film so utterly astounding comes along that it lets me forget the rest of the crap released by Hollywood and reinvigorates my love of movies as both entertainment and art. Right now that film is The Constant Gardner.

The story centers on Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) and his relationship with a woman named Tessa (Rachel Weisz). It also involves countless deaths in Africa, pharmaceutical companies and government cover-ups. It’s a romantic drama, a thriller and a social commentary all in one. And they all work here. Each theme leads into the other, not from writing necessity but from reason.

Really it reminded me most of Casablanca. Both films concentrate on a very personal and somewhat tragic love story set amidst an involving political backdrop. While The Constant Gardner came out amid the explosions and chest shaving jokes of summer, it isn’t your typical summer blockbuster fare. The film relies on emotion and visuals to keep its story propelling forward. I would go so far as to call it a mainstream high art film, one of the most pleasing oxymorons I can think of.

I usually shy away from talking about technical parts of movies but The Constant Gardner has some of the best cinematography I’ve seen recently. The use of different camera styles for different locations has been done before (most notably in Traffic) but never have I seen it implemented so fluidly. Beyond that, there are simply countless shots that would be right at home in a photography magazine. And the music … incredible! Sorry, I’m getting carried away. Have I given the film enough of a proverbial hand job yet?

One thing to note is that the style of The Constant Gardner is a bit disorienting at first. Eventually, however, it gives the film a sort of lyrical flow. There are many flashbacks and time disruptions but they all serve the purpose of eliciting certain feelings. They become more of a storytelling tool than a crutch (cough … Quentin Tarantino). This also means a second viewing is fairly necessary—which is why I’m recommending it on DVD.

When writing reviews, I try to find the good parts even in truly terrible movies. I also try to point out the shortcomings of great films. I like to be fair. But I don’t know what bad parts there are to point out here. If there’s something not to like about The Constant Gardner, I don’t see it. I apologize for not being subtle right now. I just need to get this off my chest: The Constant Gardner is one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time.

The Katherine E. Nash Gallery, located in the Regis Center for Art on the West Bank, is currently home to an exhibition titled “Cities” that includes 2D and 3D work from several different artists. These works range from the standard black and white photography of skylines and bridges to miniature clay renderings of Babylon and even a few paintings of Fargo, N.D.

A long table near the entrance holds perhaps a hundred white stoneware dishes, cups and bowls. Tetsuya Yamada’s display of housewares seems too domestic for the exhibition, but at a closer glance reveals itself to be an Ikea-inspired skyline. Aldo Moroni’s miniature Mesopotamian metropolis, “History of Civita” tiles and “Tower of Babel After Brugel” plaster cast are a fascinating and welcome change after the several awkward pieces depicting gas stations and grocery stores in Fargo that precede them. Moroni uses wax, terracotta and ceramic, among other materials, to create tiny cityscapes, rivers and buildings. Around the corner is a pristine, 3D urban landscape; Dan Tesene’s white, blemish-free layout is aptly titled “False City.”

The next part of the exhibit walls hold Mike Lynch’s visions of Minneapolis in oil, watercolor, ink and lithograph. Mike Melman’s similarly located views in silver print photography and Eric Erickson’s mundane acrylic paintings of skyways compliment the previous works. finThis section of somewhat-artistically shot and drawn scenes of the Twin Cities are all pleasant enough to the eye, but only for a second.

None of these pieces do justice to the living, breathing Twin Cities area. What could have been a dramatic and interesting, but not necessarily beautiful, photo is instead developed as a postcard-worthy and cliché-heavy skyline. These photos do nothing to further or question the concept of ‘City’ that most hold. They have been taken before, many times, and nothing about them is gallery-worthy. Or maybe the curators had no purpose in hanging the show outside of looking nice.

Stuart Klipper’s photo montage of skyscrapers and apartment buildings from a worm’s eye view most clearly attests to what I took as the exhibit’s well-hidden theme: it is the little-seen parts of a city, the surprises and not the stereotypes, that add anything of interest to the jumbles of architecture and edifice where we study, work and live.

Books and beer have never gone well together. I once tried to drink a few margaritas and study with my roommate on a Saturday night. As one drink led to five, thoughts of my homework floated blissfully away on a stratus of sobriety, and I ended up at a party with a keg cup in hand. Case and point: drinking and studying have never been a good combo, but there is a bar that is trying to break those rules—sort of. The Library has returned to Dinkytown with borders of books and kegs of beer living in harmony.

The Library opened about one month ago and its kitchen, serving up the usual appetizer, salad and sandwich-burger fare, opened on Monday, Jan. 23. Because no experience is complete without cuisine, I ordered a fiesta salad to go from their menu. (It had guacamole on it, and anything with guacamole is good.) Although my ordering experience was not perfect (the dressing was not on the side as asked and they had no plastic forks for the food or a bag to put it in), it was still decent considering they had opened only two days prior. The chicken was tender, the guac chunky and the cheese freshly grated. A warning for all the pansy, ‘I like it mild’ people out there: The red pepper dressing has the kick of a wild beast trying to protect its babies, so beware. The salad also came with these oversized tortilla chips that were flaky and fried, but didn’t taste like a tortilla chips, yet retained their scooping capabilities.

To complete my experience I had to go (on a school night no less) to the bar. My visit was basically good. I came straight from night class, and despite its Library name, I was the only one with a backpack. The bar was crowded for a Wednesday, probably due to the special for one-cent pints of Shiner Bock, which only lasted from 7 to 8 p.m. Large two-story windows made for some pleasurable people watching in the beginning of the night, but be cautious—the windows are not tinted and pointing and making faces at passersby could end in bruises and tears. Soon after sitting, an odd wave of pepper spray wafted through the front door leaving me hacking and the large, muscular doorman in tears. It was then that I decided that the upstairs needed exploring.

The second level had a second bar (Whew!) and it was setup loft-style, excellent for rate-your-future-mate games as one could stare down on the first-floor patrons without the embarrassing: They saw us staring, and played the look away-runaway routine. The rest of the night was enjoyed on a stool at the loft’s edge with my $1.50 taps of Miller Lite and great views of manly women tennis players on the jumbo tron-like thing in the middle of the ceiling, and, of course, views overlooking the lower level with the many good-looking players, I mean patrons, down below.

The Library is located on the corner of 4th Street SE and 14th Street.

Wade Oden, front man of Minneapolis’ versatile Space Station Alpha, leads his band with an infectious, fluttering energy. The minstrel-like singer was exactly as you would expect him to be at the band’s CD release party on Jan 20 at the Varsity Theater.

“We’re just so blessed to share this music with you and to be here,” Oden beamed, all excited smiles and gracious thanks for the attentive audience that gathered to hear selections off Flora, Space Station Alpha’s latest album. The occasion, shared with performers Martha Berner and Jenny Dalton, is just the beginning to what Oden anticipates as a string of performances boasting the fresher, tighter sound achieved by Flora.

Since their inception, Space Station Alpha dedicated themselves to the blurring of genre boundaries, and as a result, the production of original, otherworldly mood music. Flora takes the idea a step further, however, and emerges even more unique than its debut predecessor, Love Songs for Andromeda. Inspired by the beauty and magic present in growing things (both literal and figurative), Flora is ornamented with the dreamiest elements of folk, electronica and acid jazz.

“Everything is much more organic this time around”, said Oden, who recorded the album in his household. “I feel like something truly great has been accomplished with this band, and these particular songs have become extensions of my personality, like my own children.”

The tales of Flora are cryptic and mysterious, pairing botany and mythology with common human emotion and experience. “Vegetize,” highlighted by both salsa-esque classical guitar and an impressive whistling riff, is a charming ballad about being reincarnated as a tree. “I just do what the song needs,” Oden explains of his lyric writing process. “Each one starts as a poem and then I take it from there.”

Space Station Alpha’s live sound is pleasantly unchanged from the recordings, if not more full and continuous given flexibility of live performance. Oden possesses an elegant, articulate voice, strengthened by the chemistry of girlfriend and band keyboardist Kim Sueoka’s beautifully warbling background vocals. Furthermore, nearly all of Space Station Alpha’s members are classically trained musicians, and together on stage they form a collective of lush, atmospheric orchestrations, each song more carefully instituted than the last. The Varsity Theater is, according to Oden, Space Station Alpha’s biggest venue yet, but the band hardly suffered any intimidation.

“Everything has been wonderful and scary,” said Oden of Flora’s release and its resulting interest. What does he anticipate most? “To just play lots and lots of gigs. Oh, and maybe getting signed to an indie label, one whose music I admire.” he smiles. “It would be great to have someone stumble upon the album, enjoy it, and want to distribute it.”
With all the growing Space Station Alpha’s been doing these days, it is unlikely that Oden’s high hopes will go unsatisfied, or that any of that aforementioned energy will ever stifle.

Check out Space Station Alpha at the Terminal Bar on March 3rd at 8:00 P.M. You can also find more information (and free mp3s) at and .

The Guthrie Theater is an eclectic institution chock-full of thespian magic and musical genius. When they hosted Leigh Fondakowski’s The Peoples’ Temple, they threw a little arsenic-laced Kool-Aid into the mix, too. The play centers on The Peoples’ Temple cult led by Pentecostal preacher Jim Jones that ended in a mass suicide in Guyana, South America in the early ’70s. It was written to mark the 25th anniversary of “Jonestown,” as the event is called. Fondakowski based the play on actual interviews with relatives of those who died in Jonestown, journalists, scholars and public officials.

The story is told through testimonials from people caught up in the cult, Jones himself, and his family members. The actors describe Jones’ irresistible charisma and gift for public speaking, and how The Peoples’ Temple gave them a community during a time in which they had none. An unsigned document found at Jonestown after the infamous Kool-Aid incident describes the South American settlement as “a monument to life, to the renewal of the human spirit, broken by capitalism, by a system of exploitation and injustice.” The preacher doesn’t sound so awful at first, and indeed he wasn’t, but he appears to have eventually declined in mental health, as the ridiculous statements that he made later attest to: “I am the only fully Socialist. I am the only fully God.”

The premise of the play is certainly fascinating, but it turns out to be much more attractive on paper than onstage. The plot movement is painfully slow and sometimes sputters to a complete stop, providing numerous opportunities for the audience to lose interest. The actual text of the play likely reads something like a U.S. History book, and at times the only thing differentiating the production from a lecture is the superb singing and acting showcased by the cast. However, the tedious manner of the performance does allow for audience members to contemplate the underlying and rarely discussed issues that The Peoples’ Temple brings to light. The majority of Temple members were African-Americans and almost all members were lower middle-class. The tragedy at Jonestown has inspired countless “drink the Kool-Aid” jokes, but the role that social and economic injustice played in this event is often downplayed or not even mentioned. In the playbill author Leigh Fondakowski asks the questions, “How did this piece of American history become reduced to this? … Can we [as theater artists] use the power of the theater to bring out the nuance and contradiction in this complex story?” In that sense, the play is an unmitigated success.

At first it was hard for me to figure out what it was I found appealing about Apparently Nothing’s new album Sprawl as I listened to it in my car. The lyrics are serious, the hooks are catchy and the production is clean, but something beyond that was motivating me from one song to the next. At last, the answer arrived to me somewhere around track four. As I glanced down at the back of the CD case—while trying my best to stay on the right side of the road—I noticed that I was listening to a song called “Reason for Leaving” and that it was not slow, nor did it reek of desperation. It reminded me a lot of the day I figured out how to use the Gopher Way; I was warm and subtly disoriented, but delighted at my discovery.

Apparently Nothing formed in Madison, Wis. about four years ago. Singer/guitar player Aaron Shekey and bass player Ryan McGrew have been writing songs together since eighth grade, and the band was fully formed by their sophomore year of high school. This long-standing bond is evident in the way their playing styles connect on the album. This also contributes to their uniformity of sound and focused instrumentation. They concentrate on trying to offer something different for listeners, while still paying respect to rockers before them.

Fans of classic rock and ’80s metal, Apparently Nothing combines a full rock sound and attention-grabbing solos with alternative and pop rock. The result is an album that looks and feels like what is on the radio, but maintains a more mature and complex style. “We really try not to force anything we write. Keeping our music honest is extremely important to us. Without honesty, we wouldn’t be able to play the same songs every night and still have great times and make amazing memories from performing. We keep it sincere. Fans really know when you’re bullshitting,” says drummer Layne Knutson of their musical direction.

The other thing that struck me about Sprawl was how much fun it was to listen to. As it turns out, Apparently Nothing has a case of modern radio boredom (like many other students we know). In turning to alternative sources of music, they’ve found themselves becoming more and more influenced by what was going on 20 years ago, rather than what is going on now. “I think a lack of good modern radio programming led us to start listening exclusively to the classic rock stations … also a lot of it comes out of what is fun to play live … we all kind of realize the absurdity of it all but sometimes you can’t help rocking out to Judas Priest and Guns N’ Roses. I think we’re kind of tapping into a similar sort of energy without all the glitz and being a little more serious about it,” relays lead vocalist Aaron Shekey.

So where does that leave Apparently Nothing and where are they going from here? On Feb. 11 they’ll be in Burnsville playing at The Garage. Beyond that, the drummer Layne says, “In one year we’ll be homeless and broke, but in five we’ll have obviously realized the benefit of selling out and raking in the millions.” Let’s hope not.

---

Apparently Nothing can be found at their MySpace, or their official site.

Not unlike Ron Burgundy, the new Woody Allen movie Match Point is apparently kind of a big deal. While at the time of this article it’s only playing in a handful of theaters around the metro area, the matinee showing I attended was packed to nearly the last seat. I was forced to take a second row seat after spending at least ten minutes trying to find a parking spot. I never imagined myself being so uncomfortably close to Scarlett Johansson.

In a very convoluted nutshell, Irish lad Chris (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is a former tennis pro who ends up courting a client’s sister, Chloe. Her British family is quite well off and quickly makes him at home with a posh job, personal driver and his own company expense account. Life is good. But it gets even better when he meets American hottie Nola (Johansson) and begins an affair with her. Nola is also his girlfriend’s brother’s fiancée. She seems to be everything that’s missing from his relationship with Chloe. But, as often happens in movies, things quickly get complicated (wedding rings) and dangerous (shotguns). Did I mention this is a comedy?

Yes, you can definitely call it dark humor. The jokes aren’t pronounced so don’t expect any applause or laugh signs to come flashing on screen. And to be honest, Match Point is just as much a psychological thriller as it is a domestic comedy. Thankfully each genre works perfectly inside the material that when the story begins to shift, so nothing seems unnatural.

Alright, I lied. I’m sorry, but this is difficult for me. One thing seemed a bit unnatural in the movie. And that was… Scarlett Johansson, or at least her performance in the first half of the film. When things get more emotional and intense, she steps it up with the material. Until then, her lines just don’t come out as saucy and seductive as they’re meant to be. I tried to cut her some slack. Maybe her role as the only character not sporting a British accent was intimidating. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. Boyish crush or not, I have to be honest: she’s the weakest link in the acting department. Everyone else, especially Rhys Meyers, is stellar in a script bursting with nuance filled characters.

Basically, I really liked Match Point, but I can’t recommend it to everyone. The humor isn’t going to be up everyone’s metaphorical alley. The ending is going to downright frustrate some people. This is the best way I can put it: If you think Bud Lite is the King of Beers and you aren’t in the market for something new and exciting, then sit this one out. Match Point has its good qualities for those willing to give it a shot—a delicious, beer-flavored shot.