New York Film Festival - Fourth Dispatch

The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho) - Wagner Moura gives an electric performance as a dissident in 1977 Brazil who finds precarious protection amongst a shelter for political refugees before attempting to flee the country. Those who fell for the Oscar-validated I'm Still Here (Walter Salles, 2024) should enjoy this adept thriller skewering the Brazilian military dictatorship of the era. But at 158 minutes, it overstays its welcome. And it betrays a straightforward conventionality unworthy of the dislocations of Filho's Bacurau (2019), one of the finest films of our rapidly aging century. 

Grade: B+ 

Duse (Pietro Marcello) - I first heard of the legendary actress and Sarah Bernhardt rival Eleonora Duse (1858-1924) from All About Eve in Bill's rant to Eve about what The Theatre means (although my preteen, pre-internet mind heard it as "Eleanor Adusa"). Then for forty years, I never gave her another thought until this most welcome biopic. Marcello picks up Duse's story in the last act of her life, past previous glories and desperate to find her way back to audiences scarred by WWI. She even breaks bread with Mussolini over a doomed plan to recreate Athens in Italy. It's the kind of narrative that would have worked well with the anachronisms Marcello sprinkled throughout Martin Eden (2019), another film about a fiery artistic temperament. Like The Secret Agent, unfortunately, there's a safe, Oscary feel to the project that makes one long for the lopsided structure of Martin Eden or the proto-art-film longueurs of the Italian diva film of the 1910s. That it all still works is testament to Valeria Bruni Tedeschi's blistering performance as Duse. Out of historical sync, in tears 90% of the time, Tedeschi's Duse exhausts herself trying to find a time and a place for her art. A full century after her death, she feels right at home in 2025. 

Grade: A-minus

New York Film Festival - Third Dispatch

Rose of Nevada (Mark Jenkin) - I'll be blunt. I admired Jenkin's Enys Men (2022) as a perplexing mood piece. But I opted for his latest feature solely because I thought it would allow me to be in the same room with the co-star of the film, George MacKay, the architecturally gorgeous actor who appeared in two of my favorite recent films, The End (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2024) and best-film-of-the-decade-candidate The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023). Alas, the beauty was not in attendance. Still, I wasn't aware of his absence until after the screening so I received Jenkin's latest Cornwall puzzle with an open mind if not heart. 

McKay plays Nick, a fisherman from a present-day, rundown Cornish village who goes off with drifter Liam (Callum Turner, perhaps even more gorgeous but lacking the angularity that makes MacKay's face so delectable for filmic compositions) on the titular watercraft for a job. They return to find they are back in 1993 when the village was thriving and each subsequent run on the Rose of Nevada tosses them back and forth between the two eras. Jenkin provides narrative tension through the men's divergent reactions to the time jumps. While Nick is understandably baffled and searches for signs of his wife and family, Liam plays the sexual field and may be engaging in some conceptual incest back in the present. Jonathan Romney in Sight & Sound found it "a tale of the fantastic, but rooted in the bleak political realities of 2020s Britain." I found it suffered from the drawbacks of the subgenre - diverting while it plays but easily placed on the shelf with other puzzles and forgotten once it's over, despite its gorgeous 16mm photography and reportedly post-sync sound that make the film look like a lost 1970s folk-horror screamer.

Grade: B+

 

Sirāt (Óliver Laxe) - Since Laxe's latest shifts into shock mode about halfway through, it's best to keep this short. A father, Luis (Sergi López), with his son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), descends upon a rave in a Moroccan desert in search of his daughter who has gone missing. A military unit breaks up the rave and lines up a caravan to be arrested. But along with two groups of revelers, Luis speeds away in his van. They're all off to another rave where Luis hopes he might find his daughter. After changing tires, bartering with locals for gas, and avoiding another military convoy, things take a turn for the even worse. 

Sirāt enjoyed a June release in Spain, doing robust box office figures for an art film. It's also divided audiences pretty starkly; check the array of takes on Letterboxd. I didn't know what to do with it once I stepped off the ride. Since the ensemble are all European, Laxe may be suggesting something about colonialism or locating pleasure zones in the midst of regional conflicts. But where Rose of Nevada is a puzzle, Sirāt is a roller coaster. Extremely gripping, even harrowing, it raises your blood pressure but to what end? Wrong answers only.

Grade: B+

New York Film Festival 2025 - Second Dispatch

Resurrection (Bi Gan) 

The marketing and wide release in China of Gan's previous feature, Long Day's Journey into Night (2018), hoodwinked the moviegoing masses into thinking it was a romantic comedy instead of a drifty art film. Box office figures plummeted after its New Year's Eve opening night and the hashtag "can't understand Long Day's Journey Into Night" started to trend. We'll have to wait to discover if Resurrection (the Chinese title is different and translates as Savage Age) will meet the same fate when it hits general release. I myself felt snookered by the NYFF blurb promising a film "unfolding over five chapters that feature a dazzling array of styles and genres." As with Long Day's Journey into Night and 2015's Kaili Blues, it dazzles, to be sure. Blessed with a hefty budget, a leisurely production schedule (began in 2023, a workprint barely made it to Cannes this May), and superstars Jackson Yee and Shu Qi, Gan indulges in a feckless extravagance. He takes on the entire history of cinema with Caligari and Nosferatu nods, time jumps, and a climax comprised of yet another of his characteristic long-takes, this one lasting 30 minutes. All of this takes place in some sort of time-space continuum in which, as we are told in periodic titles, dreams either no longer exist or are somehow rendered illegal. A band of rebels called Fantasmers still dream, though, including one Frankenstein monster type (Yee) equipped with a film projector in his torso during an early silent sequence. He then reappears in various guises throughout that array of styles and genres.

As you might suspect, none of the above adds up to much in narrative terms. It sustains on mood and visuals alone. I just wish I got the buffet promised. Most of the vignettes traffic in noirish crime and grit which we have a surfeit of on television and in cinema (and in criticism and in academia and...) so lovers of musicals, melodramas, pornography, and westerns are left to f(l)ap in the wind. I also wish I knew what Gan was trying to tell us about the History of Cinema assuming he had any clear viewpoint throughout the two years it took to bring the film to life. And I rue the forthcoming exegeses that will take the framing device too seriously and "explain" how each historical and generic register makes perfect narrative sense, as if that were the heroic goal of all cinema.

Grade: B

New York Film Festival 2025 - First Dispatch

I don't feel comfortable pronouncing on the 63rd New York Film Festival or what it said about the State of Cinema overall given that I saw only nine of the over 100 titles programmed. All I will attest to is my inability to catch a single masterpiece for the second year in a row, a function of time, money, and sticking to directors/subjects I like best. Perhaps next year I'll be reckless enough to choose something outside of my wheelhouse. Or else stick with experimental films, the jazz of cinema - always there, taken for granted, and capable of dazzling you with its risky changes when you deign to check in again. 

Starting with the most infuriating film, I experienced unwelcome déjà vu with one of Richard Linklater's two biopics screening at the festival - Blue Moon, about the Great American Songbook lyricist Lorenz Hart (Nouvelle Vague, the other, concerns Godard and the making of Breathless). Taking place almost entirely on March 31, 1943, the evening Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! opened, Blue Moon finds Hart (Ethan Hawke) leaving the show at intermission and hieing to Sardi's where he proceeds to get soused and rue the success of his former writing partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott). For the first half of the film, he holds court in the near-empty bar, swirling vapors of wit and sass around bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) and E. B. White (Patrick Kennedy) writing unobtrusively on the sidelines. Then a triumphant Rodgers and his entourage arrive and Hart puts on a pathetic display trying to rekindle the songwriting spark with Rodgers and introducing him to an ingenue with whom he is inexplicably obsessed, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), an apparently real person who remains a nullity by film's end. 

Writer Robert Kaplow based his screenplay on letters Hart and Weiland wrote one another instead of the most recent biography, Gary Marmorstein's A Ship Without A Sail: The Life of Lorenz Hart (Simon & Schuster, 2012) which imparts a certain documentary value to the undertaking. We ought to embrace such deep dives into the relationships between women and bisexual men (or however we are to ascribe the morass made of sexual identity by the era). But no film is an island and Blue Moon joins De-Lovely (Irwin Winkler, 2004) and the disastrous Maestro (Bradley Cooper, 2023) as yet another nervous attempt to center the heterosexual relationships of queer composers (Cole Porter and Leonard Bernstein in the latter two instances). One need only peep the panicky poster art of each assuring Mr. and Mrs. Popcorn that no deviant sexuality will cross their screens today. Will we not get biopics of Sondheim (who shows up here at 13 years old in a cameo played by Cillian Sullivan), Ebb and Kander, or Ned Rorem because they never married women?

In partial compensation, the performances are uniformly sparkling, especially Hawke who should be a shoo-in for an Oscar nod. And Linklater ventilates his recreation of Sardi's, shot in Dublin, by letting the camera rummage through the bathroom, climb atop the staircase, sneak into the cloak room. The latter location, though, is the setting for a dreary tête-à-tête in which Weiland recounts a recent sexual exploit to Hart with nary a suggestion of how such spaces informed the creation of Hart anti-valentines like "It Never Entered My Mind, "Glad To Be Unhappy," and "Blue Moon" itself. You're better off watching the greatest film of the century instead. 

Grade: B-minus

July Top Ten

1. Book clubs. Why I didn't join one earlier is beyond me. But thanks to a colleague, I am now part of a small but enriching conglomeration of bibliophiles who remind me to eat my fiction vegetables on a weekly basis. After having been involved for only a few months, I'm totally committed. I highly recommend the experience, especially as an antidote to the loneliness epidemic. We meet on Zoom so you don't need to reside in a densely populated area to join one. There's even a website to facilitate the process. Visit bookclubs.com today! The second book since I've joined is Borges' Labyrinths which we're about halfway through (new favorite story = "Funes the Memorious"). The first was...

 2.  Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice; Pride and Prejudice (BBC, 1995). I loved it more for its status as an ur-text than for any of its masterful narrative devices. One can feel the brusque-but-tameable hero of Harlequin romances gestating in Mr. Darcy, for instance. Austen was loathe to provide much description of place so the BBC adaptation was a welcome guide through the dialogue-heavy novel. I hope the forthcoming Netflix series makes Mrs. Bennett (Olivia Colman) less of a Chicken Little. At the very least, I think most of us share her confusion, if not rage, over entails.

3. Sally Rooney: "Misreading Ulysses," The Paris Review, December 7, 2022; Rebecca Romney: Jane Austen's Bookshelf - A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend (Simon & Schuster, 2025). Rooney's thesis on how Ulysses both dismantles and upholds the innovations of Pride and Prejudice is intriguing. Austen synthesized the masculine traditions of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding with the feminine traditions of Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood and there's a parallel synthesis of the masculine (Stephen Dedalus) and feminine (Molly Bloom) in Leopold Bloom. But this conclusion is predicated on the dubious, if not flat-out incorrect, characterization of Austen as "the author of the earliest novels in the English language still widely read and loved in the present day." Under the influence of Rooney, I was surprised to find mention of any books at all in Pride and Prejudice much less that the act of reading comprises a fair bit of the narrative ambience. This is where Romney's book helps. As a reading experience, it's not recommended - Wiki-style biographies of pre-Austen writers punctuated by recollections of Romney's rare-book exploits. But as a guide for What To Read Next/After Austen, it's indispensable. Onward to Frances Burney, Charlotte Lennox, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, etc.

4. Doug Rice: Blood of Mugwump - A Tiresian Tale of Incest (FC2, 1996). A slim avant-garde novel in which a character (more like a node, really) named Doug Rice morphs into and out of his sister and grandmother. The words "cock" and "cunt" appear with frequency. Rice quotes Joyce, Faulkner, and the Pointer Sisters. A line like "By carefully studying a videotape, he had learned a trick from Meryl Streep about different ways to alter x-rays" snaps you out of the miasma of permeable borders before plunging you back into the Imaginary "world without words, amen." Photos (some fin-de-20ème-siècle, some contemporary) purporting to depict Rice and/or his sister illustrate several chapters (called "routines" here). Subsequent works by Rice include Janey Quixote and A Good Cuntboy is Hard to Find.

5. Charles Baxter: Blood Test - A Comedy (Pantheon, 2024). Unfunny variation on Minority Report wherein a suburban nobody pays thousands to a shady Theranos-type entity which claims it can predict that he will commit a murder. Always trust an author who lards his novel with arch directions such as "just flip ahead a couple of pages after you've gone out to your kitchen for some popcorn and a beer, and the story will resume." Done, dude.  

 

6. Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Journey to the End of the Night (1932); Paul Bowles: Let It Come Down (1952); Graham Greene: A Burnt-Out Case (1960). Three Heart of Darkness variations that need to be put down for a nap. The best I can say for the Greene is that I excavated one handy apreçu ("As usual there was no silence [in a Congo leper colony]. Silence belonged to cities.") and a cranky but funny one-liner ("Perhaps it's His will that you should take a nembutal."). The worst I can say about the Bowles is that I highlighted only two lines of its 300-plus pages. Improbably, the Céline was the best of the lot even though it's the longest/hardest to take and the author was a widely read anti-Semite. The locales are far-flung (i.e., the hero escapes deepest Africa) which knocks some of the stuffing out of the colonialist existentialism. Céline has a feel for flânerie in New York City, Detroit, and Paris. And he mentions avant-garde films, supernaturally hip for 1932. But in case you're curious, know that the opening of William T. Vollman's afterword does a spot-on impression of all three authorial voices: “Reader, fuck you!...You think I give a shit whether or not you’ve read this book? Or that Céline’s ghost does? That would be the day!” So reader, make this the day you read something else. 

 

7. The Listeners (Janicza Bravo, 2024). This four-episode BBC One miniseries, adapted by Jordan Tannahill from his 2021 novel, concerns an English teacher (Rebecca Hall, superb) driven to despair by The Hum, a low frequency emanating from an undetctable source. She's relieved to discover a group of people who claim to hear it as well. But they soon display cultish tendencies, a fiasco only exacerbated by the fact that she's grown closer to one of the listeners - her teenage student. Inspired by real testimonials, The Listeners focuses too much on the interpersonal to the detriment of the intrapersonal, to how sound can reorient our relationship to our bodies. But especially under the tutelage of Bravo, who directed 2020's fantastic @Zola, it's a heartbreaking portrayal of how trauma and illness can destroy relationships while creating unforeseen ones, reminiscent of Fearless (Peter Weir, 1993), Away from Her (Sarah Polley, 2006), and Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995).  

8. "Boots" from 28 Years Later (Danny Boyle, 2025). The film is a solid B+. But the score, composed by Scottish hip-hop soundscapers Young Fathers, is one of the best I've ever heard. As usual, you cannot glean this from the soundtrack album (on Milan) although it's far less abstract than the norm, beginning with two surprisingly jaunty songs as opposed to limbs desperate to find their host bodies. But heard in the film, a track like "Boots" augments the horror of this third installment in the zombie franchise. The Fathers sample a 1915 spoken-word recording of Rudyard Kipling's harrowing anti-war poem "Boots" as if it were the reanimated dead. Recited by American actor Taylor Holmes with increasing terror, it appears on the film's soundtrack with no clear source such that we don't know if the sound is diegetic. It just creeps towards us, dragging along industrial groans and ululations. Then it disappears, and we're left fearful of its return.

9. Lola Young: This Wasn't Meant for You Anyway (Island, 2024). 23 when this second album was released last year, Young already has the makings of a supernova. And she seems poised to stick around if only because she comes off so tough. Pressed up against the fourth wall on the cover, she's in our face throughout. Ten out of eleven songs come with an explicit language warning, including the spoken-word "Outro." But because she's so tough, the men and women in her life think she can handle the ghosting, co-dependency, and assholism they throw her way. These time-wasting drips put her on the defense starting with the great album title and winding through each song wherein she tells them all precisely where to get off in her cigarette-cured South Londonese. So here's hoping her longest-lasting relationship is with producers/songwriters/musicians Carter Lang (SZA, the new Justin Bieber) and Buddy Ross (Haim, Travis Scott) because together with Young, they've conjured at least eight different ways to grab your ear - distressed bhangra, poppin' post-punk, open-spaced verses clashing against brickwalled choruses, whatever Lola wants. All of which is to prep you for the September 19th release of her next album, I'm Only F**king Myself.

10. Leaving...on the Criterion Channel. My new favorite genre! Almost 100 years ago, Walter Benjamin clocked collecting/hoarding as a method for denying mortality; can't die when I have twenty-and-forever-counting hard drives choked with films, music, and books to consume. But mere death isn't enough to help with prioritizing what particular text to consume. Each month the Criterion Channel mimics death with an entire category of films leaving the channel that month. It's a perfect way to move from collecting to consuming (yes yes with Adorno cackling at you from beyond). By July 31st, I downed all the Argentinian noirs (fave was Fernando Ayala's nasty 1956 The Bitter Stems), most of the Noir and the Blacklist titles (John Berry's unbearably intense 1951 He Ran All the Way deserves to be better known), and even some mainstream crap (1990's Blue Steel, one of Kathryn Bigelow's worst). And I look forward to filling in some Guiraudie and Chang-Dong gaps by August 31st.

Best Singles/Albums of 1985

The great Brad Luen of Semipop Life renown ran a Best Albums/Singles of 1985 poll and I participated, I did. My ballot is below which gave me an opportunity to clean up my own 20-year-old (!) Fave Singles of the 1980s list, mostly as per year of release. But what I assumed would be a simple exercise soon threw me into an epistemological tizzy.   

Years are stupid things. I initially had Exposé's "Point Of No Return" in the #5 spot. But Chuck Eddy reminded me that the song was originally released under the name X-Posed in 1983 on the Pantera (!) label. Discogs concurs noting, "released in November 1983, despite labels stating "℗ 1984."" But the Wiki entry for Exposé says the group wasn't formed until 1984. So which date is correct? (Also, check out how much the X-Posed font looks like the one for X-Ray Spex.) To appease the Latin freestyle gods (Lewis A. Martineé, we invoke thee), I replaced "Point Of No Return" with "Exposed to Love" which I may prefer nowadays anyway for how much it reminds me of my favorite bubble bath, Black Orchid. 

Until last week, I thought Magazine 60's "Don Quichotte," Roxanne Shanté's "Roxanne's Revenge," and Roky Erickson's "Don't Slander Me" were 1985 releases. But all signs point to 1984. And I prefer the faster album version of "Don't Slander Me" from 1986 which I believe was never released as a single. So I might be lying by leaving it on my decade list (although I love the December 11, 1984 original too so it stays). Wiki says authoritatively that "We Don't Have to Take Our Clothes Off" was released on May 27, 1986. But Discogs shows the Arista label clearly reading "1985." The Indestructible Beat of Soweto and Psychocandy were released in 1985 in the UK but were they released in 1986 in the States? And "The Payoff Mix" EP was never officially released at all, at least not until the 2008 Steinski compilation What Does It All Mean?: 1983-2006 Retrospective on the Illegal Arts label. But you currently cannot purchase the latter on Amazon even though Discogs allows its sale. 

Then there's the matter of release date vs. year of impact. Whatever the specific date they hit the racks, The Indestructible Beat of Soweto and Psychocandy signify as 1986 albums in the States. VU was recorded in the late 1960s but most of the planet didn't hear these songs in VU (as opposed to Lou Reed) form until 1985. Exposé's romp through the Billboard Hot 100 wouldn't come until 1987. And if all of the titles below had to impact me in 1985, then I couldn't play this game at all. I owned Psychocandy and Cupid & Psyche 85 on vinyl and taped Big Lizard in My Backyard from a friend. But most of the rest I didn't hear until after 1990. To the best of my recollection, I have never held a copy of the original Sin version of Fear and Whiskey despite 20 years of crate digging. Like many, I assume, I heard it on the 1989 Twin/Tone compilation Original Sin which itself was already difficult to find on CD by 1990. 

And finally, there's the matter of format. As far as I can determine, "Mario" was never released as a single, in Europe, Africa, or the US. But I doubt that many Franco releases were perceived as albums anyway; they feel like 12" singles. "Mario," for instance, takes up all 14:19 of the A side of the Mario album with only two other songs on the B. (See also Fela.) I didn't hear it until 2001 when it was plucked all single-like by World Music Network for The Rough Guide To Franco: Africa's Legendary Guitar Maestro. Think you know what VU is? Think again, avers Wiki: "Sources disagree on whether VU should be classified as a compilation album, archival collection of outtakes, or a long-delayed studio album, though others avoid categorizing the album entirely." Avoiding categorization - how punk. I doubt Steinski himself knows (or cares) if "The Payoff Mix" is an EP or a 12" single (but note that Discogs sanely, if not correctly, sidesteps the issue with one category labeled "Singles & EPs"). And Luen calls "Round 1" "an EP title track" while Eddy on Facebook says Round 1 (guess I have to italicize it here) is an album (and so does Discogs!). But quickly thereafter (he has an infuriating tendency to edit after he first posts which, little known fact, was the impetus for Ozzy writing "Am I Going Insane"), he said it's barely an album if you "take away" the uncensored version of "Round 1," running barely over 25 minutes and 25 minutes "was the old Pazz & Jop cutoff for EPs." But, um, you can't take away a track from an album, at least not on physical releases (I suppose you could scratch out the track in question on your vinyl version or record over it on cassette). I first heard it in 1998 on Rhino's Fat Beats & Brastraps: Battle Rhymes & Posse Cuts, the best volume of the series due in no small amount to the inclusion of "Round 1." That's single enough for me and, in any case, Luen accepted it so it stays (and had he not, I'd just hit him with "You's the only crab lowlife bitch who's a bum!"). 

Who cares, right? If Luen does a 1986 poll (which he totally said he would!), then I won't be wringing my hands thusly. This is all just a reminder not to take unnatural measurements of time too seriously and not to fret that "Bon Bon Vie," "That's the Joint," and "Eisiger Wind" are 1980 releases. I so wanted them to be of 1981 provenance since I've long opined that 1981 was the best singles year in popular music history. They're spiritually 1981 singles, though, and, surprise!, I didn't hear a single damn one of them until the 1990s.   

What about the music, man? I've always gotten the impression that the zeitgeist finds years on the five lacking; something to do with mid-decade dashed hopes perhaps. But people bitch about (and hype) every year. And while 1985 wasn't stellar for singles, I was stunned to conclude that I would award an A+ to the first six items on my albums list. That said, I'm sick of hyping faves. Low-Life has long been my favorite album of all time. But I need a new one (maybe something by Beauty Pill?).  Nowadays, I'm sweeping in corners for music that has totally escaped my attention, especially non-English music; "Mario" is my sad attempt to redress this shortcoming. To that end, below my ballot, I submit my favorite ballot from the poll. Most of Dave Moore's list is non-English and even his Malcolm McLaren choice is perverse. I bet he's done time with Chee Shimizu's Obscure Sound book (great ILM thread about it here) since that's where I first heard (of) the Rare Silk album at #14. I thank him for guiding me away from the English-singing canon.

Singles

1. Roxanne Shanté vs. Sparky Dee: "Round 1 (Uncensored)" (Spin)

2. Franco: “Mario” (Choc)

3. Kate Bush: "Running Up That Hill" (EMI America)

4. Exposé: "Exposed to Love" (Arista)

5. Jermaine Stewart: "We Don't Have to Take Our Clothes Off" (Arista)

6. DeBarge: “Rhythm of the Night” (Gordy)

7. Loose Ends: "Hangin' On A String" (MCA)

8. USA For Africa: "We Are The World" (Columbia)

9. Colonel Abrams: “Trapped” (MCA)

10. Bronski Beat: “Hit That Perfect Beat” (MCA/London)

 

Albums

1. New Order: Low-Life (Qwest)

2. Velvet Underground: VU (Verve)

3. Double Dee & Steinski: "The Payoff Mix/Lesson Two/Lesson 3" (Tommy Boy)

4. Scritti Politti: Cupid & Psyche 85 (Warner Bros.)

5. The Indestructible Beat of Soweto (Shanachie)

6. Mekons: Fear and Whiskey (Sin)

7. The Jesus and Mary Chain: Psychocandy (Reprise)

8. The Dead Milkmen: Big Lizard in My Backyard (Fever)

9. Hüsker Dü: New Day Rising (SST)

10. Prefab Sprout: Two Wheels Good/Steve McQueen (Epic)

 

Dave Moore

ALBUMS

1. Malcolm McLaren: Swamp Thing 20 pts

2. Manu Dibango: Electric Africa 20 pts

3. Jasper van’t Hoffs Pili Pili: Hoomba-Hoomba 20 pts

4. Ichiko Hashimoto: Beauty 20 pts

5. Lena Platonos: Galop 15 pts

6. May East: Remota Batucada 15 pts

7. Taeko Onuki: Copine 15 pts

8. Hailu Mergia and His Classical Instrument: Shemonmuanaye 10 pts

9. Ut: Conviction 10 pts

10. Winston Tong: Theoretically Chinese 5 pts

11. Vinod Pandit: Jhoomo Re Jhoomo 5 pts

12. Junko Yagami: Communication 5 pts

13. Kate Bush: Hounds of Love 5 pts

14. Rare Silk: American Eyes 5 pts

15. Diana Ross: Eaten Alive 5 pts

16. Miami Sound Machine: Primitive Love 5 pts

17. Grupul Stereo: s/t 5 pts

18. Plastic Mode: s/t 5 pts

19. Kassav’: En Balaté 5 pts

20. Boney M: Eye Dance 5 pts

SINGLES

1. Madonna: Into the Groove

2. Mariya Takeuchi: Plastic Love

3. Kate Bush: Running Up that Hill

4. Siouxsie and the Banshees: Cities in Dust

5. Mr. Fingers: Mystery of Love

6. Amina: Shehérazade

7. A-ha: Take On Me

8. Pet Shop Boys: West End Girls

9. Prince: Raspberry Beret

10. Bellamy Brothers: Old Hippie

11. Sheila Chandra: Strange Minaret

12. Mai Tai: History

13. Melanie: Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed

14. Segun Adewale: Atewo-Lara Ka Tepa Mo ‘Se

15. Suzanne Vega: Marlene on the Wall

16. Fun Fun: Living in Japan

17. Cafe Turk: Haydi Yallah

18. Magika: I Know Magika

19. Princess: Say I'm Your Number One

20. Lee Sun Hee: Ah! It Is Ancient Times [Ah! The Good Old Days]

 

 

I Sold My Soul for Black Sabbath

Wherein an inveterate disco dancer claims Black Sabbath, the overlords of heavy metal, for disco. If indeed guitarist Tony Iommi was a master of riffs, then it holds that the repetitive nature of the riff could be marshaled for dancing as well as head-banging. Add a bassist (Geezer Butler) and a drummer (Bill Ward) who could get all start-stoppy funky whenever they wanted. And now you can grasp why metal boys appreciated this rhythmic license given to their girlfriend-hopefuls who just wanted to dance at concerts. As for Ozzy Osbourne, dead at 76 on July 22nd, it's sad that so many tributes had to satisfy rockist articles of faith by claiming that Osbourne did, in fact, write that lyric or have a hand in creating that melody. Isn't his status as one of rock's greatest vocalist enough? You hear the women of ABBA referred to as sirens for their uncanny ability to beckon you to their pop getaways. But Osbourne's voice was a two-minute warning, capable of emptying entire downtown hotels with a single wail. His enormous lung power propelled you away from him, then swept you up in all those metaphors of flight and escape that peppered his/their lyrics. And thus he became hero to generations of no-account kids who hoped for a better life outside of the capitalist grinder. It's appropriate that the most touching of the many tributes raining down this week came from Geezer Butler:

Goodbye dear friend- thanks for all those years- we had some great fun. 4 kids from Aston- who’d have thought, eh?
So glad we got to do it one last time, back in Aston.
Love you.

What follows is my attempt to siphon off all the Sab I'll ever need. Most of the findings here remain true. My Sab is a fast and dancey one. I don't go to them for ballads ("Changes" is fine but I never need to hear it again), interludes (no matter how short or how much heft they lend to each Album), guitar solos ("Warning" drags the debut into the muck of the River Thames), or even songs (again, "Am I Going Insane" causes little pain but Top 40 nuggetry is not their forte). And I don't go to anyone for prog which explains my indifference to Vol. 4 and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. Paranoid is the most consistent and contains two of their greatest dance tracks - "War Pigs" and "Fairies Wear Boots," Sabotage features Ozzy's best performance and offers plenty of prog weirdness besides, Master of Reality the dankest, Never Say Die! proof that they could outpomp Van Halen.

The comp below fits on two discs and at the very least includes "Supernaut" which most fans nominate as the best cut off Vol. 4 and which the 1976 We Sold Our Soul for Rock 'n' Roll (notice singular "soul") omitted despite including four (4!) other tracks from Vol. 4.

I Sold My Soul for Black Sabbath

(Bozelkablog, 2025)

"Black Sabbath
"The Wizard"
"Behind The Wall Of Sleep"
"N.I.B."
"War Pigs"
"Paranoid"
"Iron Man"
"Electric Funeral"
"Hand of Doom"
"Fairies Wear Boots"
"Sweet Leaf"
"After Forever"
"Children Of The Grave"
"Into the Void"
"Supernaut"
"Sabbath Bloody Sabbath"
"Hole In The Sky"
"Symptom Of The Universe"
"Megalomania"
"The Writ"
"Never Say Die"
"Johnny Blade"
"Junior's Eyes" 

 

Black Sabbath: B+
Paranoid: A-minus
Master of Reality: A-minus
Vol. 4: B
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath: C
Sabotage: A-minus
Technical Ecstasy: D
Never Say Die!: B+