War of the Triumvirate

It seems pretty likely that my three favorite music artists in the universe: Neil Young, Tom Petty, and Taylor Swift, will each release new records this year. So the natural question becomes, whose record will reign supreme??

I had a similar bout (a warm-up match, you could say), when over the course of about a year (2012-2013) I got to see all three of these acts live, in all their flesh and glory. Tom Petty won that fight decisively, bringing out an exceedingly surprising, very rare and sincerely inspired set of deep cut gems & lost classics. But in the grand scheme, it was really more of a draw... A sourly unfortunate illness muddled what may be my last chance to see my all-time favorite band, Neil Young & Crazy Horse. And while Taylor Swift's 2013 concert was merely great, and not Great with a capital G, her 2011 Speak Now show ranks uncontested as the greatest concert I've yet had the pleasure to witness. So Petty won this particular battle, but the War of the Triumvirate rages on in an apparent stalemate. And so, we cross the latest battlefield.


Artist: Neil Young
Album: A Letter Home
Expected Release Date: May 27, 2014

A Letter Home is a lo-fi acoustic covers record from Neil Young, recorded with Jack White in a phone booth. As ever, Neil is an inspired rogue, and it's electrifying. The song selection isn't especailly inspired -- My Home Town and Girl From the North Country are alright songs by Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan respectively, but they're pretty mediocre selections from artists with such spellbinding catalogs. But on the upside, it's a lo-fi record, which is by far the medium in which Neil's acoustic material sounds best. And Neil's previous covers album -- Americana -- was one of the most wonderful and unique albums of his career. Can A Letter Home match it? Quite possibly, we'll have to wait and see.

Neil Young's newer music is, just like all his older music, uneven and relentlessly, inconceivably unpredictable. But when he's good, he's really good, and the 21st Century has been a different kind of renaissance for him. Records like Living With War and Psychedelic Pill are better than anything he released in the 80s, and he's done a lot of interesting experiments.


Artist: Tom Petty
Album: Hypnotic Eye
Estimated Release Date: Summer 2014

They started out with a record of blues-rock just like their last jam, 2010's Mojo. And that'd have been fine with me, Mojo was spectacular. But not wanting to repeat themselves, they kept the best tracks off of that unreleased record, and continued recording for another year or two. Now they have a hodgepodge of prime tracks that supposeldy harken back to The Heartbreakers' early new wave days, with terse, static-charged rockers like "Anything That's Rock N Roll," and "Listen to Her Heart." How true that description is, we won't know 'till we hear it. But it's a highly promising and evocative imagery.

If anyone can knock a new record out of the park, surely it's Petty. He's amazed me again and again with his ability to retain vitality and create work that is great in new ways, ways that don't merely repeat the past. Lately his work has gotten impressively instrumental, so a part of me is hoping he'll return to a stricter format just so I can see if he still has his pop powers. And he was at the peak of his pop powers when the Heartbreakers began, with hits like American Girl and Breakdown. So, if the press rings true, this could be the ideal record I've been hoping for.


Artist: Taylor Swift
Album: TBD
Estimated Release Date: Fall 2014

She may be my third favorite artist, but typically Taylor Swift is not in the same league as Neil Young and Tom Petty. Neil and Tom have unfathomable **fifty year** careers to draw from, and fifteen years of leal service (in my life, specifically) under their belts. Tay has the potential to parallel their reigns if she can keep up her pace for forty years, but as of yet she's a small fry.

However, what Taylor has on her side, is youth. Even great artists tend to wear down after 5 or 6 albums and lose the magic. The only people apparently immune to this are Neil and Tom themselves. But Taylor's still in that sweet spot, where it's not just possible but *probable* that every new album will demonstrate the peak of her powers and attain classic status. Even if the new record isn't great, it's an inherently more meaningful experience to witness an artist in her heyday creating history rather than reliving it or running from it.

Very few details have yet been unearthed for how Tay is crafting her fifth full-length album. She's leaned towards pop, rock, country, and folk so far, could R&B or adult contemporary be next? No matter what she does, it will be interesting to hear. Her last album, Red, may not have been her best record yet. But as she continues to grow and mature, the promise of brave new work increases by exponents. And  thus far Taylor has always been willing to probe new territory.


Assessment:

Tom Petty's new record *sounds* the best, at least on paper. And it'd be no surprise for the rougish King Bee to sneak another victory, his 00s output has been among his all-time best, and it's more consistently great than Neil Young's 00s output is.

But Neil Young is like a Chaos Orb, or a Mad Targaryen. Every time he makes an album, the gods flip a coin, and born forth into the world is either a new dud (like Fork in the Road) or a new God (like Americana). A Letter Home will most likely be either crushingly awesome, or mostly forgettable. But if it's crushingly awesome, Petty and Tay don't stand a chance.

And of the opposite persuasion we have Taylor Swift, whose record is the only one out of the three that is basically guaranteed to be decent. An artist in her prime, with zero subpar records on her roster? A genuine failure would be unheard of. Now, whether the new record will err on the middling side of Red, or the flawless perfection of Fearless -- will depend largely on what new mode Tay chooses for its modus operandi. And of that, we know little yet.

So it truly is anyone's game, and I can't wait to hear all three!

Madoka Magica

Spoiler Warning: Madoka Magica TV series

Netflix is pretty good at forecasting my ratings for films. But when it comes to TV, it gets strangely erratic. Despite having very few 5-star shows and many 5-star films amid my ratings, they never predict a >4.5 for a film, but they'll quote me a 4.8, 4.9 for all kinds of ridiculous TV shows that aren't even any good. Lord only knows why in the flying samhain they predicted 4.7 as my rating for Madoka Magica, until this show I've never watched more than two episodes of any anime on Netflix and I don't even have anything like Evangelion or Dragon Ball Z in my ratings collection to point the results in that direction. Yet this was a rare case where their overenthusiastic TV rating was actually correct.

Madoka Magica was recommended to me (not by Netflix, but by an actual human) on the basis that it is to Magical Girls what Neon Genesis Evangelion is to Giant Robots. I don't generally like to go into any TV show expecting it to be Evangelion, that's almost inevitably a recipe for crushing disappointment. That's like taking a random meal from anywhere in the world and assuming it was made by an Iron Chef! But, hey... the person who recommended Madoka to me was, in fact, the person who showed me Evangelion some 13 or 14 years ago, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt.

So I started watching. And I was highly skeptical but the show turned out to be fucking awesome. The Evangelion comparison becomes apparent pretty quickly. You have your Asuka, Shinji & Rei, you even have a Gendou. But this isn't some two-bit Kinko's photocopy like RahXephon. Madoka Magica approaches its influences more in the vein that Avatar: The Last Airbender did; using the giants which preceded it as a jumping off point to see what *else* they can create, rather than using the previous work as the intended end result in and of itself.

It's not necessarily Game of Thrones in terms of trope-defiance, but this show definitely fits in with the recent emphasis on reevaluating the tenets of fantasy and aligning them more closely with the edicts of real world turmoil. And it does a very clever job of it. I especially like how Madoka is basically a side character in her own series, until the last couple of episodes. This is a welcome subversion of how Sailor Moon was necessary to kill virtually every enemy no matter how many hordes of near-equal magical comrades were attacking it before she showed up to invariably save the day.

The character designs weren't quite to my preference, they look more Chibi Moon than Sailor Moon, and their faces strike me as slightly too big (in close up shots). But I got used to it and ended up liking it by the end. And I suppose choosing this style serves the show, in the sense that it's supposed to be a more gritty/realistic Magical Girl show and these are supposed to be little girls, not the 12 year olds that inexplicably are 6'1", have mini skirt legs and size-D breasts like you see in Sailor Moon, Evangelion, ad infinitum. And the animation itself was superb, utilizing crisp, vibrant digital technology but retaining the warm, human feel of traditional animation.

Ultimately I came to dearly love and care for all of the different characters, which is a very impressive task to accomplish. Most shows have at least one character that fails to really hit it off with me. I think part of the genius was focusing on so few characters to begin with. There are no unnecessary characters what-so-ever. And the sparsity of characters also empowered the strength of the bond between them, and underlined the concept of fate's threads having already locked these people together, as we ultimately discover.

After Kyubey tells Madoka she could become a God, I started to wonder what the ending might be like, and whether they might give us a Third Impact type scenario. But I never thought they'd actually have the courage to do it. To emulate the most confounding and controversial aspect of Evangelion? Magica's finale had conscious shades of both the deific mayhem of The End of Evangelion, and the psychological confrontation of Evangelion's original final episodes, utilized in a way that felt natural to Magica's own intricacies. More importantly, it told a perfect ending to the story of the series, and quite a spectacular one at that.

Overall this was an intriguing concept with excellent characters, 12 episodes was a little thin to really tell this story. They could definitely have benefited from more time to flesh out the character's relationships and lengthen some of those lightning-fast witch fights (could that be my latent masculine side talking?). But ultimately it's really hard to argue with a succinct series with exemplary pacing and a very satisfying conclusion in which all pertinent threads are conclusively and reasonably resolved. Too few episodes is preferable to too many, where the strength of a core story weakens exponentially as extraneous content muddles its impact. And I certainly struggle to think of anything else that would have been strictly necessary for them to explore.

I can't say this is as good as Evangelion. But I can say it's better than the Evangelion movies, if only for creating something new that genuinely stands up to the classics, as opposed to merely recreating the classics. And if they do end up remaking Sailor Moon as has been rumored, that'll be a fun comparison to make, between the two. And I'm not saying they should, you know, turn Sailor Moon into Madoka Magica any more than they should turn Lord of the Rings into Game of Thrones. But I for one would be pleased if Sailor Moon's new creators would acknowledge where the genre has gone lately, in their own way.

Final note: Could Netflix have possibly written a more generic and unappealing blurb for Madoka Magica? "Madoka has a magical encounter one day. This is the story of magical witch girls." Other than the highly disturbing spoiler that the magical girls are witches, which I refuse to believe is intentional but if it WAS intentional that's admittedly brilliant (because it seems like a stupid mistake until you actually find out it was true all along!) ...erm, but other than that, Netflix made this sound like the most generic piece of shit. And I hate generic pieces of shit, so if I had not heard on good authority that this show rocked, I never would have watched it.