In keeping with my blog's self-indulgent, reader-alienating style, I would like to talk about the St. Vincent show that I went to Wednesday night which is the first of the two titular Things. St. Vincent (Annie Clark) played at the 9:30 Club in D.C. with her backing band last Wednesday which included a violin and woodwind player which are indicative of her past with the Polyphonic Spree. I feel like she got kicked out of the Polyphonic Spree for being too dark, but she kept the kick-ass melodies, willingness to experiment and headphone-throbbing arrangements of the Spree. For instance, she started out the set with her hit, "Now Now," which features a pretty and catchy melody and she ended it out of the bridge with a sudden swell of raging guitar. The gain was so high, this five-foot-two pixie alone created a wall of sound with barely a scrape of her fingernails with a tone that was, to use her own words, "abortion-y."
The night was filled with sweet grooves and atmospheric melodies and wailing saxophones and growling bass an I loved it.
Her light show was pretty kick-ass too. Her lighting designer had a great sense of rhythm and emotion with his lighting as well as humor. There was a lot of LED flood-light-type instruments being used that intrigued me. LED seems to be where a lot of rock shows are headed these days, phasing out the more traditional "tin-can" PAR lights. I cant blame 'em, because the LED is cheaper, more efficient and compact than traditional floodlights. The only problem with them is their inability to focus really or fade their intensity, not a problem in a rock show, but a real problem in theatre lighting.
My other favorite thing is the Mortal Engines series by author Philip Reeve. It is absolutely fantastic. My words cannot describe how much I love this series. To briefly summarize; the world of the story is Earth several millennia into the future after our civilization has destroyed itself in the 60 Second War, a furious volley of orbital and subterranean nuclear and biological weapons that changed the very surface of the planet and wiped out nearly everyone.
But the book is not about that. The story takes place several thousand years after this 60 Second War and we are ancient history that is barely understood. All the worlds great cities were reorganized and rebuilt on top of gigantic tank treads so they could avoid the frequent natural disasters as the earth shifted. The new world order is Municipal Darwinism, the defining tenet of the Traction Era, which demands that these Traction Cities consume smaller cities and towns and cannibalize them for fuel and parts and assimilate the people into their society or use them as slave labor. We are a few hundred years into the Traction Era and prey is becoming scarce as smaller towns are becoming less and less frequent. Some "barbarians" want to do away with this "glorious" way of life and are called Anti-Tractionists and are regarded with hate and suspicion. It is in this volatile and exciting time that our hero Tom finds out that not all is as it seems in the world. Sometimes your heros are your enemies and sometimes the "right path" is not clearly visible through the smoke of progress.
It is a thrilling book with zeppelin air-ships, scarred girl assassins, pirates and walking corpse super soldiers from another time and I could read it again and again. Hester Shaw, the scarred girl assassin, is beautifully complex and sad and is one of my favorite all time characters in literature as well as Grike (Shrike in the original British version) the Stalker, a mechanized corpse turned into a walking weapon centuries before who has developed his own strange personality and has surprising and horrifying dreams and goals.
A must read for steampunk, science-fiction or fantasy fans or fans of Harry Potter or any one who just wants a good book that they simply cannot put down! There are four books in the Mortal Engines Quartet and Mr. Reeve has another prequel series that is coming out with a new book in April called the Fever Crumb series. His home page for the series is http://www.mortalengines.co.uk/ and I suggest that you check it out.
