Word: angstful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Anti-sexual and suicidal, female American poets often fall into the wrong hands. As teenagers we read Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and even Emily Dickinson with hungry self-identification, and then as teen angst recedes we discard them. In high school, I was assigned Plath at about the same time I discovered Tori Amos, and, like many, I clung onto both of them like a die hard indie fan. But then, growing up, realizing we demanded odd things of love, our parents and our world, we tend to brush off these brilliant-brave complainers as if their long struggles with...
...illustrate adequately her points or make the reader feel them. Poor in images, her unsentimental poems are easily forgotten. Her form, occasionally (seemingly arbitrarily) rhyming, of dull everyday speech does little to enhance her words. Although she completely penetrates and bursts the peephole perspective of sexual resentment and idealistic angst, her from seems to lag behind. It is clear but uninspiring; perhaps beautiful but not in a way that fits. Allusive and chronically understated, her images betray a lingering strain of bitterness. True, Gluck does not embrace the world without mediation, but her style feels like an homage...
When things get too weird, a small crew of angst-ridden teenagers steps in to save the day. There's Stan, the wannabe intellectual football captain; Stokely, the grungy science fiction-reading loner; Zeke, the brilliant drug-dealing second-year senior; Delilah, the self loathing head cheerleader; Marybeth, the annoyingly innocent new girl; and finally the outcast Casey, played by Elijah Wood, who's a bit too cute for his supposedly nerdy character. Relying on Stokely's knowledge of science fiction--"if you kill the queen, everything will go back to normal... in theory"--this mismatched group of teens plots...
Like ads for the ESPNews channel, the promos for this show are much funnier than the product. While the best WB dramas (Felicity, Buffy and Dawson's Creek) shape teen angst into complex characters and sharp dialogue, Zoe doesn't get much beyond 10[cent] sitcom jokes. The idea of watching four non-vampire slaying Manhattan teenagers sounds appealing, but the show makes you realize how much of high school was down time, not worth committing to script. Zoe makes an effort with realistic teen dilemmas and some quirkiness, but the overall thinness leaves you wanting more Boy Meets World...
That inability to critically assess their material hurts this compilation. Youth, one might think, would work well here, imparting pubescent angst to these most angst-ridden of tunes. Unfortunately, most of the bands featured have too much respect for the songs they cover, playing them in much the same style with only minor changes of tempo or instrumentation. This forces one inevitably to compare the originals--and the comparison often comes up short. The Gadjits' take on the Simple Minds classic "Don't You (Forget About Me)," for example, preserves the source's arrangement down to the deep voices...