Back in the heyday of my gig-going days I would go see pretty much anything if there was a little buzz behind it or if I suspected I’d be interested (after trolling the net for sound samples). On occasion my presence was requested by a friend, as was the case when I was drawn to a Les Mouches/Bell Orchestre show (Les Mouches made way for Final Fantasy, while the Bell Orchestre was an Arcade Fire side-project). Both acts were interesting and powerful live, and at their merch table, selections were acquired including both LM albums and BO’s one-track homebrew ep (les lumieres parts I and II) and their Demo cd.
Neither Les Mouches nor the Bell Orchestre have been standards on my playlists or compilations. My interest in the former was more in their live performance than any enjoyment of the actual music they played, while the latter just fails to capture my attention whenever I play them. Even their full release “Recording a Tape the Colour of the Light”, which is a buttered-up version of the Demo, has been gathering dust on the shelf for some time.
Fully instrumental, the Bell Orchestre’s neo-classical compositions are in part baroque and in part free-form, occasionally abrasive or dissonant, and sometimes soft and passive. Wherever their tracks lay, however, they’re rarely immersive, and moreover some can really grate when relegated to the background.
I try to find something to glom onto in these early releases but can never connect to the material.
The BO have a new album out soon, with a tour schedule bringing them to toronto on April 24.
Super-Soldier - bridges together Superman and Captain America, Lex Luthor and the Red Skull(sorta). Written by Mark Waid and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, it’s a book that tries desperately hard to make the two characters and their origins/nemeses logically fit together, but from the first moment where they say that the baby from krypton died in its rocket and they used its DNA to make a super-soldier serum, it all fell apart for me. For some reason, that baby from Krypton dying is just offensive, as is a blonde “Clark Kent” and a flying Captain America. The whole book is just wrong, wrong, wrong from start to finish.
JLX - this book combined the godawful 1996 Justice League with a godawful assortment of mutants, creating the following hybrids: Mr. X (a cross between Professor X and Martian Manhunter); Apollo (Cyclops and the Ray); Firebird (Fire and Jean Grey); Nightcreeper (Nightcrawler and the Creeper); Mercury (Quicksilver and Impulse); Runaway (Rogue and Gypsy); Wraith (Obsidian and Gambit); and the Mariner (Aquaman and Namor… why not “Aquanamor”? “Aquamariner”?). The book opens with the JLX combating the JLA (”Judgement League Avengers”) in a battle that boggles the eyeballs, and then moves on into a quest for Atlantis (which goes like this… “Oh, I wish we could find Atlantis…oh, there it is.”). There’s copious amounts of melodrama which, given the one-off nature of this book, is completely irrelevant and damn annoying. Written by Waid and Gerard Jones it’s another maddeningly awful “cool-in-concept” book with the usually unpalatable art from Howard Porter (who would later make Grant Morrison’s JLA run a difficult slog).
Doctor Strangefate - this was, I believe, the only Amalgam title I bought way back when, the reasons two-fold: 1) Doctor Strangefate is probably the best “Amalgam” name and the most logical of amalgams they created and 2) it’s drawn by Jose Luis Garcia Lopez. The other thing about it is this is one of few Amalgam books that actually deals with the fact that it’s a composite universe, and Doctor Strangefate sends a group of lackeys out to capture Access. Access is the kid whose powers first merged the universes and now he’s trying to restore them, and Strangefate, protector of this new universe is trying to stop him. You’d kind of root for the mystic if he wasn’t such an a-hole. A decent and, at the very least, on-topic read from Ron Marz.
Spider-Boy - The writer behind a very fun run of Superboy comics, and the late, great Mike Wieringo collaborated on this merging of the punk-Superboy and Spider-Man, creating an obscenely ugly superhero, but a fun comic in spite of itself. This is mainly due to Karl Kesel’s loose adherence to the “Amalgam” philosophy, not really caring so much about creating the sense of familiarity of both the Superboy and Spider-Man worlds, but instead just setting out to tell a story that was less nodding and winking and more establishing a new character and supporting cast.