Word: surreality
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Shepard's faintly surreal yet lyrical text demands extraordinary acting. The players must give credibility to moments of farce, such as a refrigerator filled with nothing but artichokes, or a brother urinating on his sister's chart for a 4-H science project. Yet they must also preserve enough dignity to bring off sustained poetic speeches, including a climactic account of a midair battle between an eagle and a cat who doom each other to a fatal fall. The showiest part is the father (Eddie Jones), a brutal alcoholic who undergoes an overnight conversion, too late, into a sober...
...outstay their welcome. Skipping vocal samples, hysterically-burbling keys, and glitchy drum tracks lend a thrilling dash of claustrophobia to “So Begins Our Alabee” and “The Party’s Crashing Us,” and rubbery synth slouches make the surreal travel diary of “Oslo in the Summertime” ominous and dirty instead of precious...
...tunes. Barnes’ wife Nina makes the heart-racing, dewy-eyed lyrics of “Keep Sending Me Black Fireworks” all the more believable with sweet-natured lead vocals, and “The Actor’s Opprobrium” spins a narrative as surreal as those on any of Barnes’ more traditional concept albums...
Like the Los Gatos area, other regions of the West have now taken on an almost surreal look: vast, charred ranges spotted with orange flames and black smoke. But an end may be in sight, at least for parts of California. At week's end, the high-pressure system seemed to be easing, a fog moved in, and temperatures dropped into the 60s. As the first weak drops drizzled down, joyful fire fighters shouted, "It's raining! It's raining!" --By Amy Wilentz. Reported by Stephen Koepp/Los Gatos and Richard Woodbury/Los Angeles
These lines tersely describe the band’s ars poetica of sorts—to catalog and re-combine disparate particles and fragments of language into a synthetic whole. The cut-and-pasted audio material creates a surreal sort of ‘exquisite corpse’ effect, not so much relating an explicit story as exposing an unconscious mood or psychic backdrop. In extreme cases, their own lyrical contribution is literally reduced to mere finger-snapping, as in “it never changes to stop...