my synthar blurb

as usual, my latest image update blurb, a review of synthar's evenings and weekends, is kind of a gamble.

i'll explain the gambling later, but in the meantime, here it is:

Synthar: Evenings and Weekends

In this season of last caucuses and primaries, with the names of presidential candidates on our tongues and a foretaste of change on our lips, the pop-indie band Synthar has come out with just the album to match that extra kick in your step—or that worried furrow of brow—that may accompany this historic time. Synthar’s debut album, Evenings and Weekends,is a genuine, synthesized consideration of change and transformation. Its sound lies somewhere between electronica and folk—as the Jackson Free Press says, Synthar has taken “synth-pop into singer-songwriter territory.” Synthar is an internet band: its members—spread around the world from Shaoxing, China, to Jackson, Mississippi and from New York, New York, to Stanford, California—huddled their laptops together to create an irresistibly catchy mix of Moogs, vocoders, guitars, and sad, understated vocals. The tracks of Evenings and Weekends range from themes of changes in landscape—“Hurricanes” is lead singer Johnny Bertram’s firsthand response to Katrina and Rita—to the hiccups and tragedies of relational change in “My Heart Is a Beating Drum,” “Stabbed by an Unseen Blade,” and, most traumatically, “The Phone Call.” Synthar also asks us to question how our dollars and cents impact the world. In “The Robots Among Us” they warn that “in the land of milk and honey / where we walk the thin line between / what we need and greed” there are “robots among us” who “don’t understand the warmth of human touch”—and the song builds to a chilling climax when the robots join in the chorus. But most extraordinary is Synthar’s uncanny juxtaposition of generally dark, meaningful themes with spritely, upbeat melodies. The combination of thoughtful lyrics with playful synthesizing and vocal harmonies results in moments of happy-pop-bliss, making Evenings and Weekends an album that is not just smart, but indeed, as they sing in one of their happier tracks, gives you “the urge to dance… dance the morning away / and when the day finally turns into afternoon / you’ll flip the record and dance to new tunes!” Because Synthar is an independent band in the truest sense, the best way to buy Evenings and Weekends is directly from them on their website (ours even came with a handwritten “thanks.”) Plus, the handsome CD and packaging are individually screen printed by hand.

For more, visit Synthar.com. You can also listen to a few tracks on Synthar’s Myspace page.

OK, how is this a gamble? it's not that i'm hesitant to recommend the album; evenings and weekends is seriously really good. it may even be my favorite new album of 2007.

no, it's because i write these reviews for an arts journal that focuses specifically on work that somehow engages faith. therefore, i always feel challenged to center my thoughts on some theme or idea that is relevant to the image vision--faith, art, mystery.

sometimes that's a breeze--the culturally savvy christian, for instance--but often it's a stretch. it's not that i walk the plank of clear, accurate critique into the surging waters of creative interpretation, but that i sometimes have to dive beyond the patent responses of other reviewers. i have to lay all of my cards down on the table and say, "you know, i haven't heard anyone else say this, but the road sure strikes me as an incarnation story," (yikes!) and that's a scary place to be.

so here's where things get dicey with my evenings and weekends review. every other e&w review explores the synthar sound. they reference bands i've never heard of. they describe how andrew, johnny, matt, and joel have built a bridge between new wave 70s (?) and synth pop. occasionally a reviewer mentions synthar's socially conscious lyrics, but the only reviewer to mention subject matter says that he was initially turned off by the "futuristic, sci-fi themes."

(futuristic, sci-fi themes? as far as i can tell, only one song, "the robots among us," taps the sci-fi genre, and as i suggest in my blurb, it does so in a satirical, now-focused way.)

the problem is, i'm no music critic. i can confidently rank e&w among my top three 2007 albums because i probably only listened to three 2007 albums. and so my only chance of saying something profound and worthwhile about a band is to listen to those words, those strange syllabic formations that some listeners may deem a musical afterthought. and those words tell me that change is in the air. so when i say that my blurbs are a gamble, i really mean that i hope the synthar fellows won't be surprised to learn that their tracks are about change. i hope a few dozen readers will buy the album, nod their head--in time to the beat, of course--and hear the change.

my maytrees blurb

here's my blurb from the latest edition of image update:

the maytrees by annie dillard

Reading Annie Dillard’s second novel, The Maytrees, is like taking a stroll through the dunes of Cape Cod, shoeless and pensive, the sea “a monster with lace hem” beside you, and then happening upon a weathered stone or a gleaming pearl in the sand, nudging it with your foot, and sifting the salty grains through your toes as you unbury the unseen. The Maytrees moves at this same careful pace. Dillard’s practiced eye observes the love of two protagonists, Maytree and Lou, unfolding and refolding it thought by thought, again and again. Although The Maytrees explores themes of grace, aging, and nature, it is best characterized as an unabashed love story: two New Englanders marry and find themselves forever wondering what love is. Dillard, undaunted by the long line of love stories that have scoured the genre of its obvious metaphors, writes like a patient beachcomber bent on discovering her own unique treasure in the sand. With her characteristic sense of humor, Dillard encounters the mystery of love with a handful of surprising and poetic images, from Aztec priests to sinking ships. And her characters explicitly ponder the strange paradox of love, the ridiculous notion that we care “wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions,” that we bind “ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.” But ultimately, as Toby Maytree struggles to realize, “reason never trafficked in a man’s love life,” and it is “only in the face of the other” that we each find home.

some of you may frown at the strange opening to this blurb, but i really like it. it feels like poetry to me, and no matter what you might say, i think it works. i'm still thinking about the rating for this one. somewhere between a 9 and a 12.

my culturally savvy christian blurb and some words on poetry

the june 15 issue of imageupdate includes the s.o.'s reviews of sandra scofield's the scene book and michael mott's the world of richard dadd.

in addition to noting that she's reviewing two books, not one, i'd like to emphasize that mott's book is poetry. indeed, i'm particularly impressed when a fellow non-poet like the s.o. can pull that off. yes, i was an english major; i have scanned and explicated my share of strange poems, and i do all right in the comprehension department, but reviewing the stuff is beyond me. i feel rather inadequate when it comes to comparing the quality of one poem to another. i suppose prose is just my thang.

why all this attention to imageupdate? well, i also contributed to the latest issue, and it went something like this:

The Culturally Savvy Christian: A Manifesto for Deepening Faith and Enriching Popular Culture in an Age of Christianity-Lite by Dick Staub

There’s a good chance that the writer and social commentator Dick Staub is a secret apologist for Image. His newest book, The Culturally Savvy Christian, closely parallels Image’s underlying mission: it vigorously challenges readers to discern rather than idly consume, and more importantly, to nourish the contemporary culture rather than becoming pop culture clones. As the past host of a syndicated radio program, Staub has mastered the art of pairing people with ideas and watching them take off. This talent makes The Culturally Savvy Christian a particularly intriguing read: Staub collects facts and voices from sociology, theology, and pop culture and fits them into an insightful conversation about the devolution of culture and evangelicalism. He contends that most Christians, even those who travel in exclusively Christian circles, have been wooed by the forces of marketing and technology and have thereby fallen into an unconscious illicit union with superficiality and sentimentality. Staub dubs this blind self-centeredness Christianity-Lite, and he believes that to avoid a quiet backslide into mediocrity, we must get serious with our faith, sink deeper into the Word, and react to the world with intelligence and creativity. Some Christians bemoan culture’s vulgarities and believe that deepening faith requires us to withdraw into cocoons of Christian isolation and churn out happy-feely Christian art, but Staub warns us that this is not the way of Christ. Instead, he explains that like CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, and Dostoevsky, “Christian artists are not bound to create religious art, but they understand that their exploration of everyday human occurrences is gilded by their walk in faith.” The Culturally Savvy Christian encourages us to peer through the pop culture fog, dismiss the fluff, and reach for the life-changing, the thoughtful, and the meaningful.

let me know if you want any more feedback about the book. i'd give it a 10 out of 17.

despite staub's criticism of marketing, i think his book succumbs to two marketing ploys: (1) every five paragraphs or so, he has a new section. this makes the text easy to digest, but it's a cheap writing technique. (2) staub loves to watchwords. he picks adjectives that seem heavy and laden with meaning and then he uses them again and again.

still, although i skimmed the meaty middle of the book, the culturaly savvy christian certainly succeeds in its overaching goal. it is an insightful depiction of the emergence and cure for christianity-lite.