Category: Pop

Album Reviews 24/12/05

Kodak Black, Trill Bill (Capitol Records)

This Florida-based rapper boasts the necessary cachet to make him relevant to the current generation of working-class rap fans, a cohort who seemed to have completely lost the thread of whom to be mad at. This, the second mixtape he released in November, pushes the trappy single “News Matt,” characterized by a twin vocal track that’s bluesy, intentionally sloppy and horror-movie-ready in its tonality; his swagger is still there, no worries. Lots of melody here, such as in the arpeggiated piano lines of opener “Cherish The Moment,” the cheese-soaked ’80s-keyboard-driven “Dirty Revolver” and the five-star-hotel-lobby-evoking “Maybach Van.” Not much to report in the way of percussion; nearly every drum line is identical, but that’s of course secondary. As always the idea is to microwave 30-year-old tropes from New Jack City (he even gave away a truck full of turkeys on Thanksgiving, not kidding). B

Calum Scott and Christina Perri, “Kid At Christmas” (Capitol Records)

Oops, looks like I spoke too soon in the Playlist about the end of this year’s new holiday records, although in my defense it’s rare for me to be advised about new ones after the second week of November. This one’s a pop duet between 2015’s Britain’s Got Talent winner Scott and heavily tattooed American singer-songwriter Perri, whose debut single “Jar of Hearts” was featured on American TV’s So You Think You Can Dance in 2010. Bless their hearts, these two wanted to create a single that’d become a “seasonal classic is for the grown-ups out there who still get a certain warm, fuzzy feeling in wintertime” and they do make an effort in this mawkish and (spoiler) vocally muscular happy-ballad. The result is something that’s too nuanced and important-sounding to be dismissed as a throwaway tune sung by the cookie-shop owner and her (hopefully future!) beau in the latest Hallmark Christmas movie, but not by much really. B

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• As far as the retail stores are concerned, it’s been Christmas for many weeks now. On the day after Halloween, the ever-present danger becomes real, rolling itself out slowly: We walk into our Targets and Walmarts and malls just waiting to hear the first strains of Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree.” It’s always that one we hear first, with its half-plugged, anodyne Chuck Berry-ish guitar, an insidious, innocent-sounding ditty bespeaking casual joyfulness, nostalgia-loaded quaintness and buying signals, a warning shot before everything descends into a frenzy, culminating in thunderously metal versions of “Carol of the Bells” while we drive around semi-aimlessly through impossible traffic, searching the stores for that one gift we Simply Must Get. For me this year — and I can talk about this here because my wife probably hasn’t read this column for years now (familiarity does breed inappreciation, not that I’d enjoy discussing my “writing process” every week with some breathlessly gushing admirer) the Simply Must Get is some coffee mugs to replace the ones she loves: Robert Gordon Hug Mugs, the “Blue Storm” pattern in specific. Of the original four she bought years ago, only one survives today; like disposable characters in a slasher film, the other three met their ends in fiendishly clever ways. The next-to-last one expired when the handle simply fell off when I was washing it last week. Given that there’s no way I’m paying $110 to have four new Blue Storm mugs imported from Australia, I’ll start my search this week; I’ll pop into the hilariously overpriced kitchen-and-bath chain stores (funny how those companies never survive more than three years, isn’t it?) and try to find the closest match. I’m hoping to get that mission accomplished before the stores shift into full-blown “last minute/final warning” mode of the holiday shopping season, when every single place you walk into, from Hot Topic to Dollar Tree, has Andy Williams’ “The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year” playing overhead, just to remind you that “you’re out of time, let’s cough it up already, buddy, that’d be great.” Speaking of that, the Christmas album-buying season has pretty much already ended, although the new Netflix special A Nonsense Christmas with Sabrina Carpenter will show up on Friday, Dec. 6, featuring the ridiculously overexposed young diva duetting with Shania Twain among others. Hard pass of course.

• It may be too late for Christmas albums, but it’s never too late for older artists to microwave some Beatles songs for a quick buck or posterity or whatnot! We talked about Americana/country singer Lucinda Williams a few months ago, and I think I also mentioned that Abbey Road is the only Beatles album I can stand, so lucky for me (or someone), Williams will release Lucinda Williams Sings The Beatles From Abbey Road this Friday, the 6th! Naturally, the song I like the least on that album, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” is the teaser single. It’s kind of noisy, which is a positive.

• If you’d ever wanted a more sedate, epically melodic Prodigy, you may have gravitated to New York art-rock band Geese, and if you like Geese, you may like the first solo album from Geese frontman Cameron Winter, Heavy Metal, but then again maybe not! In the first single, indie piano-ballad “$0,” Winter does a low-voiced nick of a drunken Thom Yorke. I couldn’t deal with it very long but maybe his mom likes it.

• And finally it’s Austin, Texas, garage rockers White Denim, with 12, their 12th album if you don’t count their 2023 collaboration LP with Raze Regal and one or two other releases. Whatever, “Light On” combines the sounds of Relayer-era Yes with Mungo Jerry for no reason whatsoever, not that it’s officially bad.

Every Valley, by Charles King

Every Valley, by Charles King (Doubleday, 277 pages)

George Frideric Handel was not the only inspired composer to emerge during the period of time known as the Enlightenment; Bach, Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart were also products of 17th- and 18th-century Europe.

But beloved as all of these composers are, it is Handel who reigns throughout the Christmas season, thanks to his preeminent work Messiah.

It’s widely known that Handel composed the music in just 24 days, but there’s much more to the story than that. It took a village, as it were, to create Messiah as we know it today. In Every Valley, Georgetown University professor Charles King examines the players in this story and weaves their stories together, against a cultural backdrop that is not so different from ours as we might think.

“The Enlightenment as most people actually experienced it had fewer wigs and masked balls than we might imagine today, and far more pain and muddling through,” King writes, as he lays out the cultural and economic landscape of the time.

“Politicians and critics traded barbs via pamphlets and cartoons in much the same way that social media works now. Insurrections, riots, and rebellions regularly shook the governing establishment.” Wars fomented, and slavery flourished.

Meanwhile, an eccentric, wealthy bachelor named Charles Jennens — “so afraid of the cold that he lay under six blankets in winter and four in summer” — became enamored of the idea that the prophecies and promises of the Hebrew scriptures, coupled with their fulfillment in the New Testament, offered hope for the challenging age and could best be conveyed in a musical performance. He began work on what he called a “Scripture Collection” with the thought that he might engage a past-his-prime composer to set the verses to music.

“At the heart of [Jennens’] work was not so much a statement of faith as a test of will — an affirmation of something Jennens himself had always found hard to believe in,” King writes. “It was the staggering possibility that the world might turn out all right.”

King became interested in the full story of Messiah after listening to a 1927 performance recorded in England that brought both him and his wife to tears. He learned that Handel was a celebrated musician even as a young man (in his 20s, his reputation was already such that one person would make the sign of the cross ironically when his name was mentioned). But by the time he was recruited to write this oratorio, Handel was nearing the age of 60, physically ailing and suspected to be past his prime professionally.

King takes us from the early days of Handel’s professional life, from “Rinaldo” and “Water Music,” to the composer’s association with members of the royal family and notables like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. And because King is writing the definitive book on Messiah’s creation, his narrative frequently devolves into side stories of secondary characters, such as the salacious personal life of Susannah Cibber, the woman who would perform the alto solos at Messiah’s premiere and experience a sort of salvation through her association with the work.

These stories, while interesting enough, at times feel a bit like an unwelcome interruption into the most compelling one: the intersection of the lives of Jennens and Handel, men who seem to have needed each other like Woodward needed Bernstein.

Jennens was the epitome of what Americans call “the elite” — he “apparently had no ambition other than to lead the life of a gentleman” and seemed to have been something of a hot-house flower. But he filled his home with books, music and art, creating “a private sanctuary filled with evidence of what the world could be, rather than reminders of what it usually was.” And he had a special affinity for Handel, whom he called “the Prodigious,” and collected all his music with the zeal of your typical American Swiftie.

Meanwhile, an aging Handel was suffering from competition and losing patrons. While an extraordinarily gifted musician and composer, he had, throughout his career, relied on others for “words and stories [he] might render into song.” When he set out to put to music the scripture collection that Jennens had named Messiah, he completed the work in a little over three weeks, but it may or may not have been as divinely inspired as we have been led to believe.

According to King, a statement that has been attributed to Handel about the creation of the “Hallelujah Chorus” — “I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God himself” — is dubiously sourced a century later. (He also throws water on the oft-told story of how audiences came to stand during the Chorus.)

Jennens was not present when Messiah debuted before an audience of about 700 in Dublin, with the proceeds of the night going to a local hospital and infirmary and to pay off the debts of “incarcerated paupers.” It was better-received by the audience, one of whom called it “a species of musick different from any other,” than by the man who had first imagined it, and Jennens later demanded changes, and for a while didn’t want to be associated with it. (He wrote to a confidante, “His Messiah has disappointed me.”)

It’s just as well, as popular history has largely forgotten Jennen’s role, while time has elevated Messiah and its composer to mythic proportions. The original work, which took up both sides of 130 pages, still exists in a vault at the British Library and can be viewed online (and in photographs in this book), ink blots and all.

As for the story of its creation, it’s hard to see how anyone could craft a history more comprehensive than what King has produced in Every Valley although it’s not for the casual reader or the seasonal Messiah enthusiast who lacks an attendant desire to delve into the history of the age. It’s a serious and scholarly work that keeps its distance from the religious ecstasy that its subject inspires, and insists on schooling the readers on European history, whether they’re interested or not.

Moreover, in his curious need to draw parallels to contemporary society, King at times seems to tread dangerously close to political commentary.

However, for those seeking holiday reading that is not of the Hallmark variety, Every Valley hits all the high notes. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 24/11/28

Blue Moods, Force and Grace (Posi-Tone Records)

American jazz trumpet legend Freddie Hubbard has been gone since 2008, and of course he’ll never be forgotten, especially not by the — let’s just say it, often snobby crowd (mostly composed of deeply obsessed jazz musicians) who can rattle off a mile-long list of his most interesting instrumental maneuvers. This is the third “Blue Moods” release — or curation, if you will — from Posi-Tone, and it aims to address that very disconnect, wherein non-standard originals by various masters are made inaccessible to new fans possessed of an ounce of curiosity about what led to our current age of anything-goes-but-only-up-to-a-point era of jazz. There’s much beauty and whiz-bang-ery here, of course, but the smoothness of the songs is the most striking aspect of the collection; in such compositions as “On The Que-Tee,” the players — a quartet led by sax player Diego Rivera, assisted by an alternating pair of pianists — seem to want to jam forever, and the listener finds themself wishing for exactly that. Sublime and wonderful, this. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Peter Murphy & Boy George, “Let The Flowers Grow” (Metropolis Records)

Now that 2024’s culture-war-rooted election is over, it’s safe to say that this chill-electro single can be listened to with open minds from all corners, particularly since it’s such an exquisite little tune. The story here is that this highly unlikely team-up of ’80s icons (Boy George, who needs no introduction, and Peter Murphy of goth legends Bauhaus) coalesced when Murphy heard a work-in-progress demo of George’s half-finished tune, fell in love with it and finished it up in 20 minutes. It’s a melancholy but hopeful piece of chill-techno balladry with plenty of retro-’80s sound to it, lyrically dedicated to the process of coming out, a reality I experienced recently with someone close to me, someone I’d long casually surmised was gay but from whom I’d never expected to hear an admission thereof. The pair sing of a mother’s tears watering the ground so that flowers can grow, of a father facing an alternate-universe mirror image of himself for the first time. This thing isn’t just powerful, it’s supremely empowering; the video is absolutely amazing. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Nov. 29 isn’t just any Friday filled with new album releases, it is a Black Friday, the jolliest time of the year, when all the bands and record companies prepare for a relentless onslaught of random album-buying, from consumers, who have holiday gifts to buy! For people in the music-selling business, it’s that time of year that recalls the scene in the 1975 film Jaws, when all the nice townspeople gather at the town meeting to discuss why they must keep the beaches open even though there’s a humongous shark swimming around looking for human-shaped snacks; in this metaphorical context, the record companies need you people to buy albums even though most of those albums will swallow your aesthetic senses whole, in one bite, nom nom nom, leaving you butt-twerking or believing that bands like Franz Ferdinand are composed of decent musicians! Extending this ridiculous violation of literary license, you can just think of me as Quint: I’ll protect all you nice people from awful bands and DJs and nepo-baby singers named after European cities, but it’ll cost you, and you’ll need to load up my boat with fresh boxes of saltines! OK, let’s put on our rubber diving suits, hop into the totally safe aluminum shark cage, and dive into the blackness to see what we’ll find, maybe there’s something good! Uh oh, here comes a big one, it’s corporate-soundtrack-maker Bear McCreary with The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2: Amazon Original Series Soundtrack, when did J.R.R. Tolkien have time to write more stories about Bilbo Baggins, I wonder. I do have Amazon Prime but haven’t watched that show, is it as good as those other Game of Thrones cartoons or whatever they are? I don’t know, but I do know that the leadoff track from this album is “Old Tom Bombadil,” and it features Rufus Wainwright, singing in his folky Bono-meets-Pete Seeger tenor, warbling Tolkien’s words verbatim from the chapters “The Old Forest” and “In the House of Tom Bombadil” from The Fellowship of the Ring. I gather that this denotes a depressing scene in the show, which, again, I have not watched, because I don’t watch sad cartoons about dragons.

• Onward and whatnot, let’s dissect an actual holiday album, Christmas Vacation, from cowboy-hat singer Walker Hayes. This singing man is of course a nepo baby (drink!), the son of a rich U.S. congressperson, but I will not hold that against him, because he likes jingle bells and Santa just like normal people do. Unfortunately, the “Christmas Vacation” in this case has nothing to do with the Chevy Chase movie, it is a twangy country-Christmas joke song about how awkward it is when Grandma brings over her new boyfriend and how it’s so funny that the ashes of her first husband, your grandfather, are kept in an urn and that you have to drink your yearly holiday beer toast with his urn all alone and it’s weird. You know how it is, right?

• Yes, it’s holiday time, a special time for those of you who are so rich you just throw money out your car window. If you’re that rich and you’re also a fan of former Cream guitarist Eric Clapton, you’ll want to know about Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival 2023, a $90 box set featuring every star from Joe Bonamassa to Molly Tuttle playing random songs. Look at this, there’s H.E.R. playing a cover of Lenny Kravitz’s “Are You Gonna Go My Way,” the least uninteresting thing on board.

• Lastly it’s famous indie rock band Wilco with Hot Sun Cool Shroud, an EP featuring six or seven tunes they left off their 2023 Cousin album. “Hot Sun” is a pretty neat mid-tempo thing, utilizing an edgy-poppy-edgy song structure. —Eric W. Saegerr

What I Ate in One Year, by Stanley Tucci

What I Ate in One Year, by Stanley Tucci (Gallery, 348 pages)

Fame enables so much. If you or I were to propose a book in which we jot notes about what we’ve eaten over the past year, along with occasional asides about what our kids will or won’t eat, and how an airline has once again made flying unbearable, and the friends we’ve had over recently, we’d be pitched in the slush pile. But then again, our friends probably aren’t Robert Downey Jr. and Colin Firth.

And so Stanley Tucci, whose list of credits in Hollywood over the past 40 years has made him more connections than even Kevin Bacon, does get to write such a book, even though it comes on the heels of one that was much more substantial: 2021’s Taste: My Life Through Food. That book was a memoir; his latest is more a journal, and, at first glance, seems kind of scammy. Here’s an actual excerpt from page 90: “I had oatmeal in the [airport] lounge and some orange juice and a croissant. I tried the tater tot things again and they were crisper this time. … Arriving at the hotel, I ordered poached eggs, toast, and sausage, and it was delicious.”

I wish I could say that there were fascinating stories woven around those two meals, but there were not. And yet. The mind-numbing conceit of this book — a foodie records what he eats and doesn’t care whether you find it interesting or not — kind of, sort of, almost works. This is, after all, one of the most likable character actors in Hollywood, who has in recent years become associated with good eating by playing Julia Child’s husband in a film (Julie and Julia) and eating his way through Italy in a documentary (Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy). He has co-owned a restaurant and has written two other cookbooks (The Tucci Cookbook and The Tucci Table).

Maybe he’s just run out of foodie things to say, and the publisher said just keep a journal next year and we’ll buy that. And it isn’t terrible — in fact, in places, it is poignant and heartwarming, particularly when he talks about his interactions with his aging parents. And there are a couple of short, stand-alone essays that are memorable and perfectly timed, including one in which Tucci describes a fan coming up to him in a restaurant and telling him how he used to watch Searching for Italy with his wife, who had recently passed. Tucci, who lost his first wife to breast cancer, knows about grief, and uses the occasion to write beautifully about how is it absorbed:

“It would always be there. Always. But soon, it would become less prevalent. In time her presence would slip into his body, his heart, and his thoughts, sometimes gently, sometimes joltingly, but it would never last for as long as it would today. Eventually, years from now, it would alight on the tip of his soul for just a second or two, carrying with it a shiver of the past and a glimpse of a future that might have been. And then it would disappear again.”

Also, as someone who travels broadly (though tries never to be away from home for more than two weeks at a time), Tucci has a vast and alarming knowledge of things people eat outside of American food courts. The faint of heart may need to skip over the sections about the man who poached a bucket of snakes (“one of the best cooking videos I’ve ever seen,” Tucci says), and about the Italian dish he loves that features a sauce “made with the intestine of a baby calf that is slaughtered while the mother’s milk is still inside of it.” (The name, should you wish to make sure you never accidentally eat this while you are in Rome, is pasta con pajata di vitello a latte. Personally, I’m for making it illegal.)

And on it goes. We get to know Tucci’s wife and children, as well as his parents and some of his extended family, and learn that his daughter doesn’t eat much of anything other than pasta with butter and Parmigiano cheese, which doesn’t bother him because “It has pleased picky eaters and comforted the ailing and the anxious for as long as those three ingredients have been around, which is probably pretty f—ing long. Why? Perhaps because it’s so simple it helps us focus on what is necessary: comfort and health. Eating a simple dish gives one clarity. Pasta with butter and cheese laughs in the face of our complex lives.”

Many of the recipes that Tucci shares here are similarly simple: spaghetti con tonno (with tuna), minestrone soup, and rainbow chard, for example, then he smacks us upside the head with risotto with mushrooms and rabbit legs. All the while, as we read about his trip to Williams Sonoma and a bout with Covid-19 and how he first encountered wild garlic, we are never unaware of the fact that this is a journal — ABOUT WHAT SOMEBODY ATE:

8:30 a.m.: Star pasta with butter, Parmigiano and scrambled egg

10:30 a.m.: Leftover minestrone with a piece of toast

1:30 p.m.: Toasted pita bread stuffed with sheep’s cheese, tomato, and sauteed peppers and onions.

Also, the man never stops eating, and must have the metabolism of those unlucky rabbits.

There is, mercifully, some order to the year, which was, in fact, a complete year, running from Jan. 2, 2023, to Jan. 2, 2024. But it’s difficult to find the big, crinkly bow in which to tie this journal up neatly and to say, “ah, this is why I just read a journal about what a family ate.” I still don’t really know. I learned some things, such as that the British call ground beef mince, and that I will never eat a dish in Rome that ends with a latte. But beyond that, it’s a mystery why it was written, and why I read every word. And it’s a testament to Tucci’s utter likeability that I don’t want those hours of my life back. B-

Album Reviews 24/11/21

Peggy Lee and Cole Schmidt, Forever Stories of: Moving Parties (Earshift Music)

Meanwhile, out past Pluto into the Kuiper Belt, we arrive on the asteroid I usually don’t bring up in this space, experimental pan-jazz that no one knows about and mostly never will. For the most part, as you may know, jazz is at its heart a “conversational” art, which, in our capitalist context, usually involves one-upsmanship, but this sort of borderline-avant expressionism is a whole other duck, capturing the musicians’ moods at the time of recording. Peggy Lee (cello) and the hilariously overextended Cole Schmidt (Sick Boss’s guitarist) are from Vancouver, and this is their first effort as co-leaders. There are electronics afoot here, as well as guest contributors playing such instruments as bassoon, violin, trumpet and piano to various effects. “Blame” opens the record on a genial note, evoking not the rather dark titular subject but a friendly group walk to an urban coffee shop that’s preparing to close for the night. “It Will Come Back” has a lot of melodic appeal past its borderline dissonant intro; “Absences” offers more sonic schizophrenia, a mixture of afterparty steez and gaslit oddballness. Surprisingly listenable. A

DQFI, “Changes” (Nub Music)

This Saint Albans, U.K.-based band’s acronym signifies “Don’t Quite Fit In,” does that sound familiar to anyone who’s ever stanned a rock band before, anyone at all? I committed to giving this release a look-see before discovering it’s a single and not an LP, so I took it as an exercise in self-punishment and “at least you’ll learn something out of it,” like, I knew there wasn’t going to be much going on. And there isn’t. The band’s trip is sounding exactly like The Runaways did in the 1970s, but with a twist: They’re into positivity, man, because there’s so much, you know, negativity in the world! Have you heard about that? OK, OK, I’m not going to douse all you nice eyeball-equipped people in redundant nihilism; after all, the Brady Bunch band was singing “Sunshine Day” in 1972, the year the Watergate scandal broke and the Olympics were interrupted by a rather unsightly terrorist incident, so why not sing about “holding up a light” and building unity in a world where _____ and ____. I mean, why not, Ben Kweller’s a millionaire, so that old broken clock in the sky is completely right twice a day, you know? B

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Time to go buy your frozen turkey and hope it’ll be thawed within the next few days, folks, because this Friday, Nov. 22, is the last Friday before Thanksgiving, when you and your uncle will yell at each other about politics and your dog will amble over to the den to get away from it, because although Rover avoids reading any decent, informative political books just like you two do, he chooses not to start trouble over it! Awful, isn’t it, but the good news is that Ice T is back with his rap-metal band, Body Count, remember when their first album was the coolest thing in the world, before the ole Ice-man became a car insurance salesman on the teevee? Merciless is this album’s title, and — OMG, OMG, this is simply too awesome, it includes a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” but because the Ice Monster is awesome, it starts with the cool guitar solo instead of making us sit through any boring preliminary nonsense, and then he starts rapping low and menacingly about how tough it is in the hood, like, you know how it is when your local Whole Foods doesn’t have any [censored] organic avocados and you [censored] have to walk out empty-handed, with your teevee car salesman money still in your Gucci wallet, don’t you [censored] hate that [censored] [censored]!

• If you ever take a drive to Cancelville and take a walk downtown, mayhaps to stroll around the hilly, well-kept paths of Harvey Weinstein City Park or pop into Cosmo Kramer’s Tast-E Freeze to grab a yummy chocolate frappe, chances are good that you will run into one or more celebrities who can no longer show their faces in public or post things on social media without getting yelled at by everyone who sees them! Why? Because all those celebrities are canceled, like industrial-pop circus clown Marilyn Manson, who, all you ’90s kids will recall, (allegedly) stole his “monster-dude-on stilts” gimmick from Skinny Puppy, without ever asking permission. He was (allegedly) never sued for that, but it doesn’t matter because, as all you People magazine readers know, he eventually got his, but good: He got in so much trouble for all the stupid stuff he (allegedly) did to his former girlfriends that he had to move into the Motel 6 on Johnny Depp Boulevard until he could find new digs, in Cancelville’s tony upper east side! But the plight of celebrities who (allegedly) came out as morons and got mightily canceled by people on the internet is not why we’re here, we’re here to talk about Marilyn’s new album, One Assassination Under God – Chapter 1, please try to be civil! His big record contract was voided because, you know, obviously (allegedly!), so now he is on Nuclear Blast Records, an indie label that also puts out albums from, um, well, Green Lung and 100 other bands you’ve never heard of, it’s all so sad, fam. The single I’m listening to is “Sacrilegious,” a tune that tries to revive the glory days of “Beautiful People” but just sort of flops around, and he doesn’t sound very enthusiastic, but neither would you if your next-door neighbor was Kevin Spacey.

• Irish arena-pop band U2 has a new record, How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb, which is a “shadow album” of 10 discarded songs from 2004’s How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. “Country Mile” is one of these new songs, a microwaved meatloaf of uninteresting ideas that only serves to prove that even the mighty U2 can write amazingly boring songs, as if we didn’t know.

• Lastly it’s Kim Deal’s new album, Nobody Loves You More, which features the single “Crystal Breath,” a perfectly fine no-wave grinder, do go listen to it.

Bambi, by Felix Salten

Bambi, by Felix Salten (Knopf, 211 pages)

If all you know of Bambi is what Disney served up, you don’t know Bambi.

With many of Disney’s early movies, the stories weren’t written in-house — Snow White came from a German fairy tale, attributed to the Brothers Grimm, and Pinnochio was written by an Italian journalist in the 19th century. The source material for Bambi, which Disney released as an animated film in 1942, was a slim novel by the same name written by Felix Salten. It’s been re-released this year as a gold-embossed hardcover book, part of Alfred A. Knopf’s “Children’s Classics” series — which is fine, so long as this elegant, disturbing little book doesn’t fall into a child’s hands. This is not your 5-year-old’s Bambi, and Thumpers in the rear-view mirror are not as they seem.
That said, Salten’s Bambi, subtitled “A Life in the Woods,” is better than Disney’s, and I love that the foreword is the original one from 1928, which concludes, “I particularly recommend it to sportsmen.”

Like George Orwell with Animal Farm and E.B. White with Charlotte’s Web, Salten created characters who are fully animal but at the same time quite human. The book opens with an exchange between Bambi’s mother, exhausted from giving birth, and a magpie who keeps chattering about its own life. “Pardon, I wasn’t listening,” Bambi’s mother says after a while, and the magpie flies away thinking, “A stupid soul. Very nice, but stupid,” which, fair or unfair, could encapsulate a lot of conversations we all have in a grocery store line.

Soon enough, as Bambi enjoys his solitary time with his mother they encounter a ferret that has killed a mouse. And a “vast, unknown horror clutched at his heart” as the fawn gets a blurry view of some unknown horror that exists beyond his idyllic life. But his mother is not yet ready to speak of it, trying to keep Bambi innocent as long as possible while teaching him about the joys of the meadow, where “he rejoiced with his legs and with his whole body as he flung himself into the air,” and gazed at the sky, where “he saw the whole heaven stretching far and wide and he rejoiced without knowing why.”

He is introduced to three other deer, one of which, Faline, will become his mate, and catches his first glimpse of his father, who passes the cluster of deer with another proud stag without acknowledging them. Crushed, Bambi asks his mother why; she replies, “They don’t ever stay with us, only at times. … And we have to wait for them to speak to us. They do it whenever they like.”

Bambi’s mother herself grows increasingly colder to her son as he matures, once snapping at him, “Go away and let me be.” When he cries for her, a stag appears and tells him, “Your mother has no time for you now.” And this is before we ever get to the cruelty of man, the hunter, who is described throughout simply as “He.”

The word “Bambi” itself has become Bambi-ized, more associated with cartoon characters and porn stars than its source. But Saltzer’s book, while simply written, is gritty with the hard reality of animal life in which fear and death are constants. In one interaction with a squirrel, Bambi inquires about the rodent’s father, and the squirrel replies, “O, the owl caught him a month ago.” One chapter is a conversation between two autumn leaves, clinging to the top of a tree, contemplating their mortality. (“Can it really be true, that others come to take our places when we’re gone and after them still others, and more and more?”)

All this is to say, perhaps this was a “children’s” book when it was first published, five years before antibiotics were discovered and when many people still slaughtered their own meat and death had not been sanitized and swept aside to nursing homes and hospitals. Now, it’s nightmare-inducing stuff, particularly with the running theme of abandonment by parents, and a scene in which Bambi’s “Friend Hare” — which Disney named Thumper — is terrified and writhing in a trap.

In the end Salter’s Bambi is both a coming-of-age story and circle-of-life story, as the deer matures and accepts his role in the forest. Like every good story, it has a clear villain — the human — who is threaded with complexity. He both terrorizes the forest creatures and provides a safe and loving home for his dog, and even cares for an injured deer.

In one scene, a hunting dog and his wounded prey, a fox, have an emotionally charged conversation, the fox calling the dog a turncoat and renegade, since they are genetically brothers. The dog replies, “Do you think you can oppose Him, poor creatures like you? He’s all powerful. He’s above all of you. Everything we have comes from Him.”

And just when you think you’ve got the book’s theological implications figured out, Salter goes elsewhere, because this is, at its heart, a morality tale.

Stephen King once called Disney’s Bambi the first horror movie he ever saw because of its effect on him as a child. That genre doesn’t describeSalter’s Bambi the book, except maybe for vegans. But it’s a deeply affecting little book that, like A Christmas Carol and Animal Farm, shows that the impact of a book has nothing to do with its length. A —Jennifer Graham

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