Four raves and a rant
Quick reviews of the Beths, CMAT, Long Story Short, The Ballad of Wallis Island, and (a beat late) Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest
Back-to-school season always tumbles down over me in a rush, like all the apples falling at once from all the trees. Even though I don’t actually go or send anyone back to school. So here is a hectic rash of quick hits, for five recent objects of cultural consumption.
The Beths, Straight Line Was a Lie (Aug. 29): I already thought it, but album four makes it official—song for song, New Zealand’s the Beths are the finest new guitar band of the past decade. This record has all the tunefulness and momentum of the previous ones (including my favourite album of 2022, Expert in a Dying Field). But it extends itself to a wider range of adult concerns, with a more well-paced variety of textures and tempos to suit.
I mentioned “Mother, Pray for Me” in a previous newsletter, a song about parent-child estrangement I can’t even think about without tearing up. But there’s something to savour in nearly every one of these 10 tracks. The natural-science-minded meditations of “Metal” and “Mosquitoes” inflect the existential crises lead singer and lyricist Liz Stokes crashes into in the title track and “No Joy.” Then she seems to reach some tentative reconciliation with life in songs like “Til My Heart Stops” and “Best Laid Plans.”
CMAT, Euro-Country (also Aug. 29): This third album from Ireland’s Ciara1 Mary-Alice Thompson arrives on the heels of a summer in which she was perhaps the most unifying phenomenon at a divisive Glastonbury festival. And her rollicking single “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” became the latest TikTok dance virus. It also comes on the verge of her 30th birthday. That awareness of passing time runs through the album, as “a message for the party girls,” as she sings on that song: “You haven’t looked at me the same since I turned 27/ Where goes my potential? Oh, she’s up in heaven.” CMAT’s potential is actually more robust than ever. But her signature self-deprecation is a boomerang move, aimed against still-narrow social and sexual options for women, the exhausting pursuit of true and lasting connection, the melancholy of loss (the absolutely gutting “Lord, Let that Tesla Crash” is not an anti-Elon anthem but a ballad about the paradoxes that come with mourning someone who in life caused you constant pain), and the basic human struggle to grow and change.
As a title, Euro-Country alludes to the musical balance CMAT strikes between dancey and rootsy. Yet the corresponding song is also about Ireland’s attempt to preserve both identity and economy as an island in the Euro zone. A bisexual woman who treats gender very much as performance and hook-filled songs as occasions of both wit and wistfulness, CMAT has a vibe in common with Chappell Roan. But she’s several steps upwards in sophistication. I don’t usually cotton to “visual albums” but CMAT is such a charismatic drama queen that the official album YouTube playlist really is the ideal way to take Euro-Country in.
Long Story Short, Raphael Bob-Waksberg (Netflix, 2025): It’s taken me a week to get over being ambushed by the discovery, a little way into the new animated dramedy by the creators of Bojack Horseman, that the annoying know-it-all older brother and sadsack divorced-dad character Avi earns his living as a music critic. Or rather, of course, he used to, but like some of our friends, now curates playlists on a streaming-music platform.
Now that I’ve recovered from that gratuitous swipe, I wholeheartedly endorse this ingeniously novelistic series. It relates the stories of several generations of Jewish family the Schwartz-Coopers—aka the Schwoopers—by hopping back and forth between linked events over the years in each half-hour episode, thus literally making decades-long stories short. Like Bojack, it’s extremely funny and extremely poignant all at once. It’s seldom quite as nihilistically depressed. Wayward youngest son Yoshi (Max Greenberg), in particular, is an endearing creation, unique in himself but with some parallels to Aaron Paul’s role as Todd on Bojack. All the characters expand as the series continues.
It may also delve deeper into Jewish diasporic culture and even theology than any past TV show. That’s a much-needed perspective shift at a time when the world’s view of Judaism threatens to be eclipsed wholly by Israel’s wrongs.
The Ballad of Wallis Island, dir. James Griffiths, written by Tim Key and Tom Basden (2025): I won’t overburden this modest, sentimental comedy, well-received at Sundance and then theatrically in the spring, with over-extensive analysis. It’s one part Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked. Another part the Mitch-and-Mickey subplot from Christopher Guest’s folk satire A Mighty Wind. With maybe a twist of A Star Is Born (Lady Gaga edition). But still muchly its own thing.
Tim Key is a British comic I know mostly as Alex Horne’s pal and consultant on Taskmaster. But he also turned up this week as a character in the new U.S. Office spinoff The Paper, where he provides a tonal link back to the original UK Office.2 Here he stars as a rumpled chatterbox of a widower living on a remote island off Wales, who lures in for a private performance the broken-up folk duo he’s been obsessed with for years.
The male singer is played by co-writer Tom Basden (new to me), whose character has gone solo and gone pop, and doesn’t know that he’s about to be joined by his ex-partner in harmonies and more. That’s the always enchanting Carey Mulligan, who’s retired to making farmer’s-market chutney with her new husband in Portland, Ore. Obviously, old skeletons are rattled and past affections stir. But mostly with enough understatement that cliché is only lightly skirted.
The landscapes alone are worth the excursion. But there’s also exquisite acting in this fable about fandom, creativity, and letting go. Key’s non-stop puns (speaking of his past travels: “Kathmandu? Very much Kathman-did!”) evolve from maddening to adorable. And most remarkably, the songs composed for the duo (also by the talented Basden) are actually credible as music that could have earned a cult following and one doofus’s devoted fixation. At least, they are if you squint a little, as you probably will because your eyes will be misting over.
Highest 2 Lowest, dir. Spike Lee, starring Denzel Washington (2025): I sabotaged myself by seeing the new restored print of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low at my local rep cinema the Revue just a few days before seeing the new Spike Lee joint based on it, a couple of weeks back. It’s a bold thing to attempt. That 1963 movie does everything so perfectly that it overshadows what the new one does merely well. That’s especially true when it sets up the dilemma facing the wealthy businessman at the centre of both stories: At first he thinks his son has been kidnapped, then has to decide whether he’ll still pay the exorbitant ransom when it turns out that the kidnapper instead mistakenly scooped up the son of his underling and friend.
In Kurosawa’s film, it’s clear the payment would bankrupt the family of Toshiro Mifune’s shoe-company executive. Denzel Washington’s music-biz mogul doesn’t seem to be in the same position. So instead of feeling caught by proxy in an impossible moral quandary, we’re just watching a rich guy be a selfish jerk. Apt enough for 2025 America, but a massive missed dramatic opportunity.
Likewise, where Kurosawa’s film feels like a story about new kinds of corruption brought by modernization in postwar Japan, the stakes in Lee’s seem more about masculine pride and out-of-control intergenerational resentment. Maybe in contemporary Black culture in general, or maybe just for put-out aging egoist uncles like Spike and a scenery-munching Denzel. It does everything but tell youth to pull their pants up.
Yes, in the middle there’s a bravura chase sequence through multiple layers of New York street life and infrastructure, soundtracked by the late Eddie Palmieri’s salsa band, which reminds us of Lee’s brilliance and makes the film worth seeing. But be warned, the rest of the score (Howard Drossin) is overbearingly awful. And it’s a puzzler to imagine what place Washington’s character is supposed to have in any facsimile of the contemporary music industry, aside from a brief on-point allusion to the threat of AI. The presence of A$AP Rocky, in a role I won’t spoil, briefly sets up a standoff over the state and meaning of hip-hop today, from the director who gave the genre its cinematic breakthrough in Do the Right Thing. But in the film’s tacked-on coda, we find (spoiler?) that all Denzel really wants is to put out tepid retro-soul ballads, making it feel utterly ridiculous that anyone ever hoped it had anything cogent to say.
“Keera”
Haven’t made my mind up about The Paper itself yet, having just watched the first few episodes. As a former newspaper worker (i.e., an “Expert in a Dying Field”), I’m wholly on board for its romanticization of the mission of print and local journalism, well-embodied by Domhnall Gleason as a neophyte editor striving to revive a once-proud Toledo daily. I just wish it was funnier. But past Greg Daniels shows like Parks and Rec and The Office itself also took a season or more to click, so I’ll give it a chance.
I have a sinking feeling that terrible song at the end of HIGHEST 2 LOWEST represents Lee's idea of "real music."
Look forward to rewinding the new LP with your observations in mind. Such great songwriting. And hot damn they're a great live band!