CRITIC-AT-LARGE: L'Étranger (The Stranger), The Strokes: Reality Awaits, Ariana Grande: petal, Arca: XXXXX

HEADING L'Étranger (The Stranger)

SUBHEADING New Francois Ozon movie scans a bit like a perfume commercial

Albert Camus’ 1942 novel L'Étranger is essentially impossible to adapt in another medium. Francois Ozon’s solution is to turn it into a film of surfaces, glossy exteriors, perfume-commercial sheen. It’s an appropriate treatment for a novel centred on a disconnected, lonely, existentially aloof young man who quite literally can’t see past surfaces; who refuses to allow himself re-entrance into the fantasy of being human in all its weird social rules and mortal paradoxes. But it sometimes means that Camus’ protagonist, Meursault, comes off as merely shallow. Maybe that’s Ozon’s larger point—his adaptation does great work to scope out Camus’ Algerian setting and the racial discord simmering away in the background, mainly because Ozon’s medium allows him to, say, casually display a sign that says “No indigenous may dine here” in the background of a scene that is otherwise focussed on something else. When he adds dialogue between the discarded women and scenes that “empathise” with the Arab characters, though, I can’t help but feel he’s missed the point—and the sheer nastiness—of Camus’ novel, and instead has produced an adaptation that reflects more the values of our time than of Camus’. Ozon is still a strong enough director for this film to really sing visually, and I’m quite a bit surprised that his reputation as a treasure of contemporary French cinema has not landed here in Aotearoa. I guess that’s because his gift is that he disappears behind the camera—he’s not a philosophising auteur, but a steady craftsman. But then again we feel his hands warping this narrative... Did we really need the anticipatory flash-forward shots of Meursault's imprisonment? When so much of the novel’s narrative is built on the steady forward lurch toward the absurd, never quite sure when things have tipped over the edge? Did we really need the sudden outburst of interior monologue? When this is so much a film of beautiful but vacant surfaces? In these senses, Ozon’s adaptation is merely contradictory—and one wishes that somebody was thinking a little harder behind the camera. 

HEADING The Strokes: Reality Awaits

SUBHEADING Generational NYC band sounds tired 

I hope it’s not crazy to say that The Strokes’ 2020 release The New Abnormal was the album that at last matched their 2001 debut, Is This It, nineteen years into their career. Where Is This It revolved around short and snappy rock numbers, fitted out with singable hooks, swinging between sincerity and irony, affecting late 70s listlessness for the early 2000s, The New Abnormal formed an almost exact counterpoint. On that album, the songs were longer, sprawling, and more sincere—it even carried some synthpop influence, and was all the more successful for it. Their latest offering, Reality Awaits, is another small pivot, another tiny readjustment. The first and most obvious change is the introduction of an intense autotune effect on the vocals of frontman and songwriter Julian Casablancas. He’d experimented with vocal effects before, on the band’s 2011 album Angles, to some success—but this feels different, and to some extent less warranted, especially for a band whose ethos thus far has seemed to be Less is more.

Opener “Psycho Shit” builds steadily, and Casablancas’ vocals sound fantastic here as they reach an electro-hysterical pitch and the guitar figure morphs at the bridge into a great wee solo, not overplayed. But the closer “Tyrants of the Yellow Moon,” which shares a guitar line with the opener, relies a bit too heavily on the obvious Radiohead influence, and it's just hard to summon up any feeling as a listener about how it encircles its single vocal motif, insisting upon itself. Much of the album proceeds in typical Strokes fashion this way, with their almost monothematic treatment of the pop song—there’s one hook, and the rest is fodder. And in that respect, uptempo “Lonely in the Future” and its downtempo mirror “Going to Babble On” (which shares the same chords) are the album’s most successful songs. While “Falling Out of Love” is probably supposed to be its emotional centre, it falls a bit flat in the songwriting department: “Dancin’ in acid rain alone; it’s new / But I don’t wanna do it anymore / I guess I’ll sing alone”...? I actually don’t mind “Liar’s Remorse,” whose dramatic, theatrical applied chords recall something of Rufus Wainwright—and which finally finds musical expression for the incessantly autotuned vocals. Here, Casablancas is washed out and washed up, angry at somebody who he wishes behaved differently toward him; who doesn’t “have love cause [they] don’t want pain.” His electric vocals suit this character, whose story and whose song warble endlessly in the void—and he’s damned in the song’s conclusion to “Go somewhere to get drunk / A reservation, dinner for two”; in other words, to go nowhere. But, apart from as a small theatrical excursion in the procession of the album, it’s hard to say that the track—or indeed this album—warrants repeat listens. It too goes nowhere. I suppose, after their debut, The Strokes have always been low-key disappointing; the band that never was. But The New Abnormal showed such promise! And, until now on Reality Awaits, had they even sounded so resigned to their fate before?

HEADING Ariana Grande: petal

SUBHEADING Ariana Grande goes dark

Ariana Grande has entered her blue period, and her great subject on this record is no longer love and sensuality, which she has been such a steadfast and intelligent chronicler of, but resentment, power, and sometimes downright hatred. “kiss me” opens with a Robyn-esque dramatic thrust of chords, then dissolves into an hyperpop beat over which the singer flits delicately, almost losing out amongst the instrumental: “Kiss me” is the chorus’ command indeed, but “Kiss me like you know this is goodbye” is the cutting full line. Elsewhere, Grande “Hates that [she] made you love [her]” over an 80s-lite backing (“hate that i made you love me”) and tosses off burns like “You’ll keep getting breakup songs written about you” (“oh well”) on a track underpinned by a breakbeat that would sound fresh again if pinkpantheress and FKA Twigs hadn’t got there first. For Grande, now, every new relationship comes cut with the threat of loss, and she’s keen not to lose out when things inevitably go to shit: “We should play it safe / ‘Cause I don’t wanna burden you” (“never get over me”). “bad thing” is another fun 80s number, but one that this time lets the facade drop; and “nowhere, nobody” sings us home, Grande turning back to love in all its complexity and anxiety. petal is clever to play it all very chill, both rhetorically and stylistically speaking—perhaps too chill—but the result might just be the sleeper album of her entire catalogue. Grande won herself a dedicated legion of fans with a winning streak of at least four strong albums that marked out her alternative RnB, pop-glossed sound—from 2016’s Dangerous Woman to 2020’s Positions. While she seems at this point in her career incapable (or perhaps, as this album proves, just unwilling) to do anything really exciting after such a feat, petal is a welcome nudge back in the right direction. Its grab bag of genre influences bring Grande some new sounds here, but they might need a few more years before they’re fully integrated into her style and raised to the level of achievement we know she’s capable of. 

HEADING Arca: XXXXX

SUBHEADING Pioneering experimental composer returns to her roots

Arca’s always worth a listen, but she doesn’t sound as strong here as she did on her five-album series Kick, which spanned what must’ve been for the artist a furiously industrious year, from 2020 to 2021. Where the Kick series displayed a reggae and dub influence, albeit one processed through her razor-sharp techno impulse, XXXXX feels more like a return to hardcore and rave cultures, the mastery of whose forms first made Arca her name on mixtapes such as &&&&& from 2013. There are supermassive sonic constructions here, such as “Willow”—compressed synth lines, placed forward in the mix, are held against abstract samples panning across left and right outputs—and the later exercise in sidechaining, “Throb.” The largeness there plays off against tracks of great focus and intensity, such as brutal groovers “Syncope,” “Fxck,” “Futurality,” and “Grip”—but apart from these more outstanding numbers, there’s a sense that Arca’s a little uninspired. For me, it takes the Kick-esque “Taconeando,” whose name refers to a step in the tango and whose clipped and busy vocal line is as much a percussion instrument as anything, to get me excited for music that’s totally, idiomatically Arca’s. Same goes for “Sueno,” the screaming, blazing closer with a teasing, endlessly irresolute harmony. But for XXXXX as a whole, “exercise” is definitely the operative word—it’s Arca flexing her muscles. And while Horowitz could make even Clementi sound like Mozart, it’s just better when he’s playing Scarlatti.