I’ve mentioned this several times on Opus already, and here’s the official word, straight from the band:

Writ on Water’s new album, A Wingless King, is available now from our online store, concurrent with the re-launch of writonwater.com.  A Wingless King features 11 new songs, as Daniel and Jeff are joined by drummer Jared Mackey and special guest Jon Sonnenberg.  Two songs—“Dead give away” and “Ancestor”—can be heard at our MySpace page.  Free downloads of non-album rarities are available at writonwater.com.

Leap Day 2008 also marks the re-issue of a fully remastered edition of the Pelléas EP (2000) and Writ on Water’s debut album, Sylph (1992), both of which are also available through the new online store.  A remastered edition of The Greyest Day Sessions: 1992 - 1994 will be available in the spring, followed by two EPs of new material: Ancestral Echo and Wunderzeit.

 

I’ve made no secret of my ever-increasing love for Sweden’s Club 8. Their latest album, The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Dreaming, is the very essence of pop perfection. And now, Labrador Records is offering up a series of remixes of “Jesus, Walk With Me”, the first single from The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Dreaming.

The first remix is by Stockholm-based Jimahl, and it stretches the wistful pop ballad into an 8-minute chill out with layers of electronic beats, soft electric guitars, and nostalgic atmospheres. Click here to download.

Larry Norman—considered by many to be the father of Christian rock/contemporary Christian music (CCM)—died on February 24, 2008 from heart failure.

Although I had read about Norman many times over the years, thanks to magazines such as CCM and Heaven’s Metal (now called HM), it wasn’t until my sophomore year of college that I actually heard his music. My roommate at the time had a copy of Only Visiting This Planet, and from the very first spin, I knew I was listening to something special.

At the time, I was getting into both “Christian” alternative music (e.g., early Tooth & Nail, Blonde Vinyl) and lots of left-field, experimental, avant-garde stuff (e.g., World Serpent, Soleilmoon). Suffice to say, my interest in “classic” rock was at an all-time low, and even moreso my interest in “Christian” classic rock.

And yet there was something in Norman’s music that struck me as far more revolutionary and left-of-center than a lot of the other music I was listening to. His songs were full of apocalyptic gloom and doom, cries for redemption and salvation, and indictments of ills that existed in both the Church and secular culture. And his blunt, searing language was even more pointed and provocative than even the most “alternative” of the Christian acts in my collection. Suffice to say, this wasn’t your parents’ Christian rock.

I’ll admit, I haven’t listened to any of Norman’s music in a long time, and yet, his death has certainly left a void. Perhaps it’s because I just now realize how a big a debt the Christian music industry—a term that Norman probably would’ve rejected—owes to him, and also how ignorant most Christians, musicians or otherwise, are of that debt.

Andy Whitman has this to say:

That’s from a song on Only Visiting This Planet, and you can bet your glow-in-the-dark Bible verse keychain that the Blackburn Family wasn’t singing anything like that. So when I read about his death this morning I was more than a little surprised to find tears welling up. Larry Norman is dead. Damn. On that first album of Larry’s I ever bought he sang, “You think it’s such a sad thing when you see a fallen king/Then you find out they’re only princes to begin with.” He could have been describing his own life. For a while I viewed him as the great Christian musical hope. Eventually I figured out that he was a screwup, just like me. He was the imperfect brother I never knew. He was the king of Christian rock, and I will miss his imperfect, maddening greatness.

 

And then there’s this tribute from—of all places—Entertainment Weekly:

Fans of contemporary Christian music (or CCM, as it’s come to be known) often claim that their heroes could be mainstream stars if only they didn’t sing about Jesus. Usually, that’s a lot of malarkey, but in Norman’s case, it happened to be true: A lot of his early work wouldn’t sound at all out of place between Wings and the Stones on a classic rock station, if not for his (usually) righteous lyrical concerns. How far his influence really extended is up for debate, given the relatively few records he sold—although as unlikely an acolyte as Frank Black of the Pixies has cited him as a hero and even recorded his songs. “Larry was my door into the music business, and he was the most Christlike person I ever met,” Black said in a statement Monday.

 

Once upon a time, there was a band called L’Altra that released several albums of atmospheric, orchestral post-rock (or at least, I think that’s what the kids called it). L’Altra is (apparently) no more, but founding member Joseph Costa has begun recording music under the moniker Costa Music.

Costa Music’s debut, Lighter Subjects, is due out on May 1 here in the States, courtesy of Belgium’s Stilll Recordings (Off The Sky, Holiday For Strings, Fennesz).

You can listen to several tracks from Lighter Subjects on Costa Music’s MySpace page, and they’re full of soft, subtle atmospherics, tasteful blends of organic instrumentation and electronic manipulation, and Costa’s hushed vocals (which bring to mind Patrick Phelan).

IGN recently released a trailer for The Fall, the newest from director Tarsem Singh, best known for 2000’s The Cell, as well as music video work for En Vogue and R.E.M. (he directed the acclaimed video for “Losing My Religion”).

The Fall, which is set in a California hospital circa 1920, follows the relationship between a young immigrant girl and an injured Hollywood stuntman who begins telling her an epic, world-spanning tale about bandits, warriors, evil rulers, and beautiful princesses.

As the trailer shows, The Fall is quite the visually arresting film. I saw it in 2006 at the Toronto International Film Festival, and it was easily the most beautiful film I saw, full of gorgeous scenery (the film was shot in over 20 countries) and opulent costumes, and it sports a sense of imagination that immediately brings to mind the likes of Terry Gilliam (cue the The Adventures of Baron Munchausen comparisons).

However, as I wrote in my Twitch review:

Throughout the film, I felt like Tarsem was trying to get my attention, to get me to notice this really alluring costume, or the angle at which he shot this stunning castle wall, or how he was able to seamlessly transition from the shot of a pinned butterfly to a deserted butterfly-shaped island. Simply put, The Fall ends up drowning in its own excesses, constantly trying way too hard to wow the viewer and sweep them off into an imaginative, whimsical tale of heroes, bandits, and princesses in such an obvious manner that it ends up feeling rather ingratiating.

 

It probably didn’t help much that I saw Pan’s Labyrinth at the same festival. Both films share certainly similarities: they’re both full of amazing and creative visuals, both revel in the power of myth and story, and both feature a heroine for whom the lines separating fantasy and reality become increasingly thin.

However, I found Pan’s Labyrinth to be the much stronger and more compelling film. Perhaps it’s because Guillermo del Toro grasps something about myth—its darkness and otherworldliness, its redemptive properties, its subtlety—that Tarsem, for all of his visual acumen, doesn’t.

That being said, I would never describe The Fall as a waste of a viewer’s time. Beauty is still beauty, and there’s much to praise in Tarsem’s ability to create such fanciful settings. As I wrote in my TIFF 2006 recap, See it for the eye candy, which falls somewhere between Terry Gilliam, Ron Fricke’s Baraka, and a National Geographic special, and you might be pleasantly surprised.

• Jeffrey Overstreet on Syndromes And A Century: I’m dizzy with joy. I’ve just had one of those rare experiences at the movies. It only happens about once a year, and sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. It’s that giddy feeling that I’ve just seen something which will become an all-time favorite, something I can’t wait to see again soon, and again, and again. And I can’t summarize what’s great about it, because it’s a vast, mysterious, and beautiful work.
• I love me a good small caps, and so I find this I Love Typography article by Alec Julien fascinating. An excerpt: Small caps are uppercase glyphs drawn at a lowercase scale. A common misconception—unfortunately reinforced by most word processing programs as well as by CSS on the web—is that a small cap is just a regular capital letter scaled uniformly down to a smaller size. In actuality, a proper small cap is a carefully crafted glyph that differs in significant ways from a uniformly-scaled-down capital letter.
• Also on the typography tip: “A Font We Can Believe In”, which is all about Barack Obama’s use of the font Gotham in his campaign materials.
• Vanity Fair has a very nice look at The Force Unleashed, the upcoming Star Wars video game: It is being billed as the ‘next great chapter’ in George Lucas’s space saga, one that, according to the project’s art director, Matt Omernick, ‘aims to convince players that, “Oh my God, I’m actually, finally, in a Star Wars movie.”’ And not only that: it will be a Star Wars movie with a life of its own. Watch the trailer here.
• Brett McCracken asks “Can’t Old White Men Just Get Along?”: As our rapidly changing country pushes forward in the midst of recession and uncertainty, the last thing we need are a bunch of aging white men quibbling over potty mouths and conservative cred. In the globalized, digitized, Darfur-burdened world we now inhabit, there are bigger fish to fry. And that is one reason why the majority of Americans (and almost all young Americans) are voting for Democrats these days.

I know that bringing Jon Stewart back to host the Oscars struck some as a bit odd, as his job last year was received fairly coolly. Personally, I thought he did a fine job—nothing brilliant, but still fairly entertaining. And so far, his hosting job at this year’s Oscars hasn’t been all that different.

However, as far as I’m concerned, bringing Markéta Irglová back on stage so that she could give her thanks after being cut off by the Oscars orchestra was such an act of class that Stewart can keep the hosting gig for as long as he wants.

It’s official: as of last week, Simon’s residence is now Opus HQ. Even though it’s been a few days now, we’re still getting used to not having to trundle off to the hospital every night to be there in time for his evening feeding. But more importantly, we’re still getting used to having this little person around all day, every day. Not that we would change anything, mind you.

On a related note, we’ve been incredibly humbled by the continued outpouring of support and good will, be it Renae’s mom coming down for a few days to manage the house while we learn to manage Simon, some generous gifts from my co-workers, or folks from church supplying us with many amazing meals. (You’ll never know how much you appreciate real, honest-to-God home cooking until you’ve subsisted on hospital food for the better part of six weeks.)

In its own way, it’s incredibly convicting, especially that last bit. We’ve often seen e-mails come across the church mailing list about some expectant family and think “We ought to do something for them”, only to let the opportunity pass us by. Suffice to say, now that we’ve gone through this, we realize exactly how big of a blessing a little thing like a home-cooked meal really is—and I expect we’ll be a little more proactive in that department.