FILM REVIEW: The Icarus Line Must Die

     “Everybody in your band has been psycho,” Joe Cardamone’s wife, Charlotte, reminds him in the new film, The Icarus Line Must Die, released to streaming services last week by Dark Star Pictures. Encouraging words with subtle derision as Cardamone, singer and headmaster for the Icarus Line, stresses over getting a band together for an upcoming show.

    The Icarus Line, out of Los Angeles, most often are compared to The Stooges. Both groups share the same manic scuzz thrashing and raw power anchored by spastic frontmen. But, if the Stooges were the cavemen crawling prehistorically and thumping the ground in lost sexual pursuit; the Icarus Line are those same cavemen generations later gobbling tangy psychoactive plants and then turning on each other.

    The Icarus Line Must Die was shot in black and white and feels like an early-90s lost indie. They were never going to find the Big Time, but they were going to leave every stage like a tornado of whips and dynamite had hit. After what starts off as a seemingly straightforward rock band documentary, the narrative shifts to a quietly problematic conversation about money with Cardamone and Charlotte. The film finds its emotional center early. As the two sit in a cafe, we see the hurt on Cardamone’s face as he hears of the toll his music career is having on his wife. Her patience starting to bend, he knows he needs to make this work.

     In 1998 the cringing began with Cardamone and the original line-up of Aaron North and Alvin De Guzman on guitar, Lance Arnao on bass and Aaron Austin on drums. Their first two full-length albums, Mono and Penance Soiree, are two of the great releases of the last thirty years. The music can be unforgiving; a knife jacked into your ear drum. Real nightmare shit to play in record label offices and predict sales for. Sadly the group’s career suffered fits and starts and unofficially folded the night Scott Weiland overdosed in 2015. They were the opening act for the reunited Stone Temple Pilots and dissolved with the tour. Around this time, De Guzman became ill with bone cancer, pushing the future of the band into even murkier terrain.

     The camera follows Cardamone as he embarks on turning a profit on the studio and finding a distributor for what would become the Icarus Line’s final album, All Things Under Heaven. Cardamone is left to run the studio he built with the last morsels of record label advance money and is hilariously encouraged to record a group of snotty rich kids for their dough. Cardamone squirms in his seat at the thought. When the “band” does come in for a session they treat Joe like room service and he righteously cuts the cord.

     Cardamone walks the streets of Los Angeles in contemplation and anguish. He is searching for the spark. He runs into a number of characters. Singer Annie Hardy and musician Ariel Pink bring comedic relief. Pink as the overly sure guitar virtuoso with more pedals than hours of practice and Hardy as the girl who asks the universe for guidance (herself). Keith Morris from Circle Jerks, Black Flag and OFF! worms into a few scenes to offer advice to Cardamone about recording, music, life.

     The few scenes with De Guzman are heartbreaking as Cardamone offers dry humor to an untenable situation. The old friends share some laughs. De Guzman seems to have reached some level of contentment with his coming demise as he remarks on the absurdity of church’s holy comfort. He would pass on in 2017. The relationship between Cardamone and Charlotte is most powerful. His every move hinges on her opinion. She supports him even as his career hits a stagnation point. Utterly patient, with a gleam in her eyes, they slow-dance in the kitchen with the cocker spaniel watching, knowing they’ll get along.

     The Icarus Line Must Die looks at the real world difficulties of maintaining a musical establishment in the shit-slide streaming era. The focus is on a less-praised chapter in the life of a musician and doesn’t simply recant past glory. There is no washed Behind the Music formula at work here. Joe Cardamone chases his beloved band’s quiet fade into obscurity revealing life as it all comes apart.

 source: http://imp

FILM REVIEW: "One More Time With Feeling"

Nick Cave Tries to Deflect

His Most Upfront Hurt in Doc

     As Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds rehearse Else Torp sings her part on the new song, “Distant Sky.” The camera zooms out the pace of rising mist through the ceiling to show the recording studio, its neighborhood, its little corner in southern England and the whole of Earth as it turns into another Sunday.

     “We are a tiny blue dot in a moonbeam,” Cave narrates over himself riding in a car through London’s night streets in a scene from One More Time with Feeling, the group’s new in-studio documentary. We are particle size when seen from a distance. Insignificant, scant, a blip. We live and we die and on the world turns. Cave knows this. It’s the very principle lurking behind each lyric.

     One More Time with Feeling, directed by Andrew Dominik, follows Cave, along with dark-eyed, black-whiskered instrumentalist Warren Ellis and the other Bad Seeds during the recording for their new album, Skeleton Tree. More specifically, though, it’s about Cave caught in a whirlpool of emotion as he attempts to create art in the aftermath of the tragic death of his 15-year old son, Arthur.

     In July of 2015 Arthur fell 60 feet off the Ovingdean Gap cliffs overlooking the English Channel in Brighton. Reportedly, he had taken LSD with friends and separated after experiencing a bad trip. In the film the horrific event is spoken about only in background statements without context and never with detail. There is talk of something unfortunate happening, a far-off hurt, but what or to whom is unclear. Arthur’s name isn’t even mentioned until near the end when it becomes very clear what this is all about.

     Arthur, the beautiful blue-eyed boy, left behind his twin brother, Earl Cave, to mourn with his parents. In One More Time we get a peek into Nick Cave, the Well Adjusted Family Man, a fairly rare sight. We see the family joking around, finding strength together. Cave speaks lovingly of his wife Susie Bick and how they worked through the tragedy together. “Happiness is our revenge,” he says about getting over the cruelty of what happened.

     The result of all this becomes the nine songs on Skeleton Tree, their sixteenth album. Deliberate cameras capture the process. Some of the footage was filmed using “this ridiculous black and white 3D camera,” Cave says. It soars around the recording studio, embedded in corners of walls and falling through circular stairwells. It captures the quiet moments between creativity, focusing on plugs in walls, sounding boards, cracks in door frames and conversations in the next room.

Still from One More Time With Feeling

     Throughout One More Time the film crew is often visible, becoming almost another character. Everyone is very self-aware that filming is in progress and how foolish it seems. In a sense this is a movie about making a movie about making an album. A circular track is laid out around Cave’s piano in the middle of the studio. As he plays gloomily a team of six men huddled on what looks like a toy train circles slowly around him.

     To allow a camera crew to capture you unguarded is some kind of artistic bravery. Cave keeps it together, even shares a few laughs, but there’s an intense sadness hiding behind the hard outer Cave exterior. He is very open and honest detailing the difficulty of trying to make a record, trying to structure songs, while surrounded by trauma. Arthur’s death, he explains, disrupted the creative process.

     Cave paces the room, dejected about his work, unsure of certain piano notes, overdubbing in doubt. So much vulnerability underneath those dark black bushy brows. He recoils, unable to make sense of the tragedy, unwilling to find within it poetic justice.

     When asked about his recent lyrical distancing from the personal narrative, he struggles to explain how incredulous it is to try and define an event in measured verse. Writing from the depth of his personal experience in this tragedy, he says, would be a disservice to Arthur.

     “Time is elastic,” he says. We get further and further from a particular moment in time, but like a stretched out rubber band, we eventually snap right back.

source: http://imp

FILM REVIEW: "20,000 Days On Earth"

Cover design for 20,000 Days On Earth.  Photo courtesy of DraftHouseFilms.com.

Near the end of the film 20,000 Days On Earth, Nick Cave, with the Bad Seeds behind him, performs among a throng of fans. He grabs the hand of a young girl, pressing her palm onto his chest as he whispers into the microphone, "Can you feel my heartbeat?" He repeats the line, at the end of “Higgs Boson Blues,” until the fan can only look him in the eye and nod, yes.

   When the song ends, Cave jumps back onto the stage, his energy restored. "When you enter the heart of the song," Cave explains in the film about performing live, "you can be taken away...and feel godlike."

   The improvisational documentary by filmmakers Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard is meant to play like one full fictional day in the life of one of rock and roll's greatest frontmen. The audience sees how the man is currently living and working and encounters a glimmer of insight into his creative process.

   Throughout 20,000 Days On Earth, the Bad Seeds are hard at work on their fifteenth album, Push The Sky Away. Cave and his right-hand man, multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, work on an off-the-cuff song about Lionel Richie. They share a lunch and reminisce about a Nina Simone performance at the Cave-curated Meltdown Festival in 1999 that left them with mouths agape. Ellis rides an elliptical and conducts a children’s choir for the recording of “Push The Sky Away.” The viewer is given a rare opportunity to gaze deeply into Cave's dark blue eyes as he sings.

   The film does not follow the basic linear retelling of the average rock documentary. Instead, it’s Cave offering stories of his early days with Birthday Party, growing up a brooding boy in a small Australian town and balancing church life with drugs when he was a young adult.

   At one point during Cave’s day, he stops to revisit old photographs and various pieces of memorabilia from his life. He seems delighted, even giddy, to be pouring over and celebrating his past.

   Rather than simply regurgitating old clips from a storied career, what the filmmakers have done is show their subject's emotional reaction to his past. This is where the film succeeds most.

   Seeing a bubbly Nick Cave, grinning from ear to ear, looking over photos of himself isn’t exactly the image one would expect from the cagey prince of goth. He isn’t the most forthcoming about personal details so it’s welcoming to witness him acknowledge his own personal and creative past.

   The film intermittently is cut with Cave opening up to his therapist. The whole time the therapist looks just as transfixed as the audience by what his patient is telling him.

   When asked about his first sexual experience, Cave discusses being turned on at 15 by a girl with black hair and a very white face. He insists the experience wasn’t outrightly sexual, but admits that her contrasting features flipped a switch inside him. At that moment he became aware of the power of arousal--a power that would go on to greatly influence his songwriting.

   The most stunning revelation of the film is that the man with eyes like coal has his own set of fears. As Cave drives through rainy Bristol and navigates his day, he looks back on the past with a host of guests. With longtime collaborator and friend Kylie Minogue in the backseat of his car, he discusses the vulnerabilities of being a rock star.

   His whole life, he explains, he imagined becoming the man he is today: bold, acerbic, lyrical, confident, a showman. The success of becoming a famous persona has outweighed his inner self and he finds it difficult to retreat to any sort of normal life. Not that he would want any soft of “normal” life.

   Ultimately the film inspires the creative heart to dig into something deep, something profound. We live in our work. Our art is our reality. Cave talks a lot about memory and how our personal histories are shaped only by what we remember. His biggest fear, he says, is to lose his memory because it would then be as though he were never there. Songwriting for him is the net that captures his life experiences as he finds a perspective on them that makes sense.

   Find out where 20,000 Days On Earth is playing in your city here.