FIRST THREE BEAR-FLAVORED ALES

Bear-Flavored Pale Ale #1 (26 IBU)
5 gallon extract batch
Grains: 0.5 lb American crystal 20L / 0.5 lb cara-pils
Malts: 3.3 lb light LME / 3 lb light DME
Hops: 1 oz Perle (bittering) / 1 oz Cascade
Yeast: Safale US-05 dry ale yeast
Expectations: I didn't have every high expectations for my first Bear Flavored Ale — capturing the flavor and essence of bears is notoriously difficult. #1 didn't turn out terrible, in the general scheme of things, but it's so far removed from what I was expecting that I am definitely a bit frustrated with it.  Basically, this beer is just too sweet. There are so many things that could have affected the outcome, given my limited knowledge at the time of brewing, that I'm already done worrying about it. Mostly, I think the outcome was a problem shared between the recipe I was using and my own techniques. For one, this recipe didn't have much in the way of hops, so they were never meant to pop through in the flavor end. But to make matters worse, I think I let the hops go a bit stale, and I'm also pretty sure that I added the flavoring/aroma hops too early in the boil. The beer came out very bready, kind of thick with a definite yeast flavor. This, too, confuses me. These first two recipes came with dry yeast, which most homebrewers recommend avoiding — so partially, it could be that I wasn't using great yeast. But I also wonder if maybe the fermentation didn't quite go right, and maybe cut out before it was meant to. Since I wasn't taking gravity readings, I have no way to know. Lesson learned.
Taste: If I told you that this was some kind of sweet light brown ale or something, you might not be disappointed. It's not terrible, and some bottles have hit me better than others, but the sweet maltiness is just a bit overboard for my tastes, and that yeasty, bready flavor is never going to seem right to me. I can't say that I've ever had a commercial beer with a similar profile. Hopefully I'll be able to avoid it in the future.
Keeper? No. When I return to brewing a pale ale, I'm going to go for something hoppier, dryer and not as bready. There's nothing here worth borrowing from — just a number of things to learn lessons from. But that's why it was my first brew.

Bear-Flavored IPA #1 (43 IBU)
5 gallon extract batch
Grains: 1 lb crystal malt 60L / .5 lb crystal malt 20L
Malts: 3.3 lb light LME / 3 lb light DME
Hop Schedule:
0.5 oz Kent Goldings @60
1 oz Galena @60
0.5 oz Cascade @45
0.5 oz Cascade @15
0.5 oz Kent Goldings @0
Yeast: Safale US-05 dry ale yeast
Expectations: If you understand what IBU's mean, you'll already realize what I wish I would have known before I brewed from this recipe. 43 IBUs isn't very hoppy for an IPA, and is actually more in line with an American pale ale. Unsurprisingly, this came out tasting like what I expected from my pale ale — except it's still got some distinct yeasty / bready flavor that I can't quite pinpoint, and definitely don't like. I think it's mostly the grains, partly the yeast, and very likely the methods I used during the brewing process. Still — you can at least taste the hops in this one, and while it's much darker and maltier than I would like, it's serviceable.
Taste: There's that something about the flavor profile in this IPA and pale ale that I'm not a fan of. It's not bad, but it has something going on that just isn't right for the style, and maybe not right for ales in general.  It's definitely a larger issue than not using enough hops — though in addition, there are not enough hops, so.  There aren't any subtleties going on, and while the mouthfeel and carbonation and all that are fine, this beer just doesn't have a whole lot of character. Even the hops are a little bland and generically bitter, from what you can notice of them. Having said that, I do prefer it over the pale ale.
Keeper: I'll likely be brewing IPAs more than any other style, so it's possible that I'll return to something vaguely similar to this. But as with the pale ale, there isn't enough that I like here to base another recipe off of, so I doubt I'll ever tweak this one intentionally.

Bear-Flavored Peach Wheat (Peafeweizen)
5 gallon extract batch
Grains: 1.75 lb wheat malt
Malts: 3.3 lb wheat malt extract / 2 lb extra light DME
Hops: 1 oz Hallertau (bittering)
Yeast: Wyeast #3068 Weihenstephan Wheat
Adjuncts: 3 lb peach puree (added to secondary)
Expectations: For this beer, I finally strayed from a basic recipe kit and set off into Adventureland, so I had high hopes. Unsurprisingly, and reassuringly, I think this is by far the best beer of the three, and inarguably the closest to the expectations of its style. This tastes like a hefeweizen. Whew. There's none of that bready, yeasty flavor that overtook my first two. Of course, few things are ever perfect, and I'm haunted here by one glaring flaw. For some reason, this beer didn't carbonate properly, and most of the bottles I've had so far have been kind-of flat. Sigh.
Taste: I really am shocked at how much this came out tasting like what I wanted. The peach is on the subtle end of things, but you can actually notice it if you know it's there. Instead of an overpowering, sweet flavor, it contributes more of a general fruitiness and a slightly tart, slightly sour profile that I think goes well with the wheat base. Everything together is fairly subtle, with the effect that this tastes like your basic hefeweizen, except not quite. I really came so close here, but I can't quite be satisfied since — and I'm not quite sure how — the priming sugar hasn't quite done its stuff.  After two weeks of conditioning, this is still coming out with very little head, and mostly flat. Fortunately this doesn't affect the taste very much, but it does reduce the enjoyability of the beer — and it's annoying. I have no idea why wouldn't have carbonated properly, since I added the usual amount of priming sugar, but wheat beers are generally pretty high in carbonation, so it's sad to see this one so lacking. Hopefully a few more weeks of conditioning will help a bit.
Keeper: Most likely I will keep this recipe around to play with in the future, although it has a few things working against it. For one, peach puree is really goddam expensive, apparently. It cost almost as much for the peach as it did for the rest of the beer, and the flavor is so subtle that I wonder if it's really worth it.  (Probably why you rarely, if ever, see any commercial peach beers). While I am enjoying this, I'm not enjoying it significantly more than I would a standard hefe, so it'll likely be a long time before I revisit this recipe. When I do, I may increase the percentage of peach or try to bring out some more unique flavors in order to differentiate it, because, why not?

SOME THOUGHTS FROM A NOVICE HOMEBREWER

Beer is the greatest thing in the universe, so it stands to reason that you'd want to make your own. Congratulations. You’re basically entering a long, delicious period of forced alcoholism, only you have to work harder at it. If you're curious about the beer-brewing process, and wanted to hear the perspective of someone who just barely knows what they're talking about, then you've come to the right place.

Now, I'm a sucker for the DIY thing, but such activities are rarely entirely practical — we started mass production of consumer goods for a reason, after all, and there are very few things you’ll be able to create more cheaply and more easily than their manufactured counterparts. Sometimes you can make them better. Mostly, you can enjoy just knowing how they’re made, and do something more productive with your time than working on sculpting your ass imprint into your couch as you watch endless reality TV show marathons. It feels good to do something, to make something yourself. And in the case of homebrewing, the result is 5 gallons of beer. That’s 50 bottles. Of beer. After a hard day of work, there's really nothing more comforting than knowing that there is yeast living in a bucket in your closet, farting out alcohol for you to drink.

Still, there are some important questions. Why brew beer, you may ask? A reasonable question, I suppose, if you hate having fun, are a terrorist, or drink wine. In this blogopost, I will attempt to answer this question, and other questions. Why brew beer? In all seriousness, the answer as the same with any DIY venture. It is fun, it makes you cooler and more attractive, and you can make a convincing (if still bullshit) argument that it's educational. And eventually, if you are good enough, you will get beer out of it. (So basically the exact same reasons people learn to play guitar.)  However, homebrewing is not necessarily cost-effective, and it's definitely not a time saver — pretty much for the same reasons you wouldn't start a band with the goal of obtaining free music. If you’re going into it for financial reasons, maybe reconsider. You should brew beer because you love beer and want to understand what makes beer so much better than all other available beverages, and also, to impress other dudes with beards.

Probably the first issue anyone is concerned about is cost. The cost of brewing your own beer is a difficult thing to address, but consider that the most important factor is your own mindset. A basic brewkit can be obtained from anywhere between $85 to $150 dollars, but it's very easy to spend twice that after your first few batches on little conveniences here and there. After doing it for ten years, you might have spent a thousand dollars on equipment. It's certainly possible — you can get elaborate keg set-ups and fancy custom-built stainless steel equipment and all sorts of gear for the sake of convenience. But technically, you can get everything you need to brew beer for under $150, maybe even less than $100 dollars. I started by purchasing an $85 dollar equipment kit which had everything I needed to get started. In retrospect, I regret not buying a more inclusive kit, but as a beginner you unfortunately don’t really know what the hell anything is, or how it’s used. I bought a large, 8-gallon aluminum kettle at the convenience store for cheap (no equipment kit that I've seen comes with a brewing kettle, but chances are you don't have anything large enough already sitting around in your kitchen.) Soon after brewing my first batch, I decided a few more things were going to be worth the extra investment. I upgraded my hose with an auto-siphon, which I can’t recommend highly enough. Trust me, you don’t want to have to dick around with physics and gravity and magnets and bullshit like that. After deciding to do a peach wheat beer, I needed a secondary fermenter, so I was back at the homebrew store picking up a hefty glass carboy, which don’t go cheap. And other things — a decent stirring spoon to avoid gross contamination from cook-ware, a funnel, PBW to remove bottle labels, extra sanitizer, extra bottle caps, etc. Plus, once you know you need to start saving up empty bottles, it’s even easier to justify picking up another sixpack at the store. It’s for Science.

Sooner or later, but probably sooner, I’ll very likely pick up more odds and ends. For example: my apartment doesn’t have central AC, and yeast start to get pissy when it gets too hot — like above 75 degrees. (Temperature control, surprisingly, is one of the most important factors to consistent homebrewing. Sanitation is the other. And your recipes, obviously.) While there are ways to keep the temp down on a fermentation vessel, it’s a lot harder to keep 50 or 100 bottles at a reasonable temperature for an extended period of time, especially during a muggy New York summer. I’m currently looking to buy a mini-fridge from some college kid moving out, which wouldn’t be a big investment. The thought of having to give up brewing for the next three months is devastating, since I'm just getting into it.

Still, equipment is more or less a one time investment, and not that much of one.  Ingredients generally cost around $30 - $40 for a 5 gallon batch. So, that's not bad. Sixpacks of decent beer rarely cost under $10. Looking at just the cost of ingredients, brewing your own beer costs less than half of what you'd pay for beer of the same style in the store. Of course, there are cheaper options out there — but you'll still probably beat the cost/taste ratio of medium-grade stuff like Yeungling or Lion's Head. PBR and Budweiser will start to edge you out in the price arena, and beers cheaper and worse than that, well, they'll always probably be cheaper and worse than what you can manage. Here is one of the great ironies of homebrewing: lagers are much harder to make than ales for the homebrewer, despite being drastically cheaper (usually) at the store. This is because lagers ferment at colder temperatures and require an extended fermentation process, meaning they require additional equipment and attention. Plus, lagers (especially pilsners) generally go for a much cleaner, lighter flavor that leaves no real room for error. If the concept of 'no flavor' being difficult to achieve perplexes you, consider that a slightly off flavor in a rich, complex beer like a stout will be masked by everything else going on, whereas your Bud Lites and so forth are calculated to have as little taste as possible, thus leaving nothing to mask any fuck-ups or inconsistencies. Weird, but it does make sense. Even crappy beer is still complex, and there's a lot that can go wrong. The Big Guys have multi-billion dollar budgets. They have equipment you will never in your life have access to. They have an automated process that allows them to brew watered-down lite beers very very cheaply. To me, the amount of work necessary to create a "decent" pilsner, a beer that will never approach my favorite IPAs, wheat beers and pale ales, just isn't worth it. If you are a fan of pilsners, you can certainly try them yourself down the line, but the general consensus is that newbies should start out with ales.

For me, the most difficult thing was just understanding what I was doing the first time I brewed. There are a lot of things to manage, and the process can seem long and strange.  I still don't fully understand what effect every little detail can have, much less the variations and outcomes of every potential ingredient that goes into a beer. For the first few times, it's going to be easiest to buy a pre-assembled recipe kit. Make sure everything is fresh, and the recipe includes "speciality grains" and hops. (If there are no hops in your recipe kit, you've been sold shit.) Once you're brewing and get past the stress of that first batch, the most difficult thing is waiting to brew again, to perfect what you've learned from last time and try out new ingredients (especially if your last batch was drinkable but not great.) I'm a little tiny bit obsessive, and a perfectionist, so I've been spending hours online reading homebrew forums since I started, trying to pin down basic recipes for ideas I had. Possibly the most difficult but also exciting thing about beer brewing is the sheer, absurd variety of ingredients. You really begin to appreciate how absurdly complex beer is when you're staring at a list of dozens of hops, grains and yeast, all of which have their own specific attributes. There is literally no beverage in the world that can match beer's complexities and subtleties and variations — not coffee or tea or soda or wine or milkshakes. The combinations just within the three main ingredients are nearly limitless — to say nothing of adjuncts — and if you have the right personality, you'll undoubtedly get caught up in searching out new combinations and tweaks. At that point, it can be excruciating waiting to brew your next batch.

Will your beer be good?  That depends. I'm not even going to get into all the techniques involved in the actual process, since this post isn't meant to help anyone who's already started brewing. But to summarize, there is extract brewing (slightly simplified) and all-grain brewing (which requires an extra step, and therefore additional equipment and opportunity for errors, but also greater control and freshness). Either way, homebrewed beer has the potential to be as good as anything you can get in the store. I will comment (in another post) on my first few brews, which I can confidently say are not poisonous. One of the most appealing things about homebrewing, to me, is the imagination involved. You can pretty much make anything, from clone recipes of hard-to-find favorites, to wacky experimental beers that no one will want to drink. You learn a lot about beer in the process. If you need a hobby, some way to feel like you've actually accomplished something with your evenings and weekends and blooming alcoholism, it's hard to beat homebrewing for its resulting satisfaction.

HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE (BY) CHARLES YU

Published 2010, 231 pages
Characters: C-
Writing: B
Plot: C
Pacing: B
Poignancy: B-

Every now and then a book comes along that seemingly every Big Name in the literary world decided — possibly through a show of hands after poetry readings at KGB Bar — to just jump on and overhype. It's a great thing for an up-and-coming author, and I guess I can understand the appeal for an industry type, hoping to toss in their hat before everyone else does, so later they can be all "Hey I called it!" So every year, a few books come out that seem to receive all the buzz. (Side note: this happens in music too, obviously.)  Late last year, How to Live Safely In a Science Fictional Universe was one of those books.  I first heard its praises sung at my local bookstore.  Then, seemingly everywhere.  It has a glowing review featured prominently on its Amazon page from an author whose novel I quite enjoyed.  Lots of people thought this book was a poignant masterpiece from a new literary hotshot.  But still, the literary world was restless.  "What did Derek Dellinger think of it?" they asked.  A free copy of the book was quickly ushered along to me, all for me to read and ponder and review, before it's due back at the library.  Well, ever the contrarian, I'm not quite so impressed as everyone else.  There are some interesting ideas here.  It's reasonably well written.  It's a bit of a third-rate Vonnegut knock-off, which I'm surprised no one else mentioned.  "It was okay." - Derek Dellinger.

How to Live Safely In a Science Fictional Universe is about Charles Yu (hey! that's the name of the author AND the main character!), who repairs time machines for a living.  The novel means this in a quote unquote kind of way, because mostly Charles just floats along in between dimensions hiding in his time machine with his dog and his sexy interactive software personality, TAMMY.  There is very little repairing. Or interacting.  Mostly, Charles reminisces about his dad and his own life and how he sucks.  Then a thing happens and he thinks he's trapped in a time loop, doomed to repeat the same events over and over, and the only way to fix things is to reminisce about his dad and his own life and how he sucks.  (Could it be possible that time travel and recursive loops are metaphors?  I'll give you a hint, it's TOTALLY possible!)  And that's pretty much it.  I won't spoil anything.  Not that there's much to spoil.  

How to Live Safely In a Science Fictional Universe is a slim book, in every way.  My main problem was that there just isn't enough to it.  Charles Yu is essentially the only character in the entire book, and as a narrator, he's never particularly interesting.  He's not funny or clever enough, he doesn't inspire much tension or drama; he barely manages to push the plot forward.  The only "person" Charles actually interacts with in the course of the narrative is his on-ship software, TAMMY, who isn't any more interesting than Charles is. (She's an operating system that's become depressed and doesn't think she's any good, like the beginning of an idea Douglas Adams might have had and then forgot to run with.)  There's a dog with hardly any role in the story, and then Charles' absent father, who he spends the majority of the novel thinking and moping over, essentially just an emotional MacGuffin.

I mean, okay. It's a story about time travel. I'm not complaining that essentially everything that happens, happens in the "past."  But even then, nothing much happens.  I suppose a large part of my problem is that I'm entirely fed up with Daddy Issues in entertainment.  I have never and will never find Daddy Issues remotely interesting.  Sorry.  I don't care that your dad didn't love you enough.  Being a teenager sucks, I know.  Family dynamics are hard and most people felt mistreated by their parents and whatever, yeah, okay.  I just really was hoping we could move this whole Daddy Issue business now, in our post-Lost world.  But I guess the entertainment industry is never going to give it up.  

Too bad this book didn't have any more on its mind, because Yu seems like he has the potential to be a clever writer.  There are some good ideas here, some decent writing, even if everything is overly-satured in an air of Literary Poignancy.  There are some attempts at humor, and some of them land.  But mostly they blend into the whole post-modern air of Too Clever For Its Own Good.  In a way, this really does remind me of a third-rate Vonnegut book.  Obviously, I love Vonnegut, but the man wrote a ton of books in his career, and sometimes his ideas just got regurgitated, spread too thin.  That's what it feels like here — moments of cleverness and insight, but drowned out by the overwhelming assumption throughout that it's all a grand statement on the nature of life and regret and memory and humanity.  Really, there are only a short-story's worth of memorable ideas here.  I read this book very casually, never more than a few pages at a time, and I found that pace to be indicative of my opinion of it.  I never disliked it, I was never bored, but otherwise, it seemed a whole lot more interesting before I actually started reading it.

PERDIDO STREET STATION (BY) CHINA MIEVILLE

Published 2001, 710 pages
Characters: B
Writing: A
Plot: A
Pacing: A
Poignancy: A

Perdido Street Station is the most impressive book I've read in a long time.  One of the best, too.  It's not a perfect book, but goddam does it feel good to be blown away by an author's sheer imagination sometimes.  It's why I got into this whole 'reading' nonsense, isn't it?

Last fall, I read China Mieville's The City and the City. It wasn't a perfect book, and the end lacked a certain punch that might have made it truly profound, but it was nonetheless a vividly atmospheric read, dripping with creativity and literary ingenuity.  Perdido is another love letter to Mieville's baroque, labyrinthine cities, somehow both gritty, convincing and surreal at the same time. The two books of his that I've read share a similar impact, but Perdido is bigger, more ambitious, and simply better.

Unfortunately, it's not even fair to give a basic plot summary of Perdido Street Station, as the twists and turns the story takes before settling into its main trajectory are a big part of the fun.  The back cover blurb is wonderfully misleading, but for good reason, so I'll try to mimic it. Perdido Street Station is sort-of about an unorthodox scientist named Isaac, who finds himself forced into new avenues of research when he's hired by a mysterious foreign visitor to research the mechanisms of flight.  Of course, that doesn't begin to explain anything.  In the first hundred pages or so of the book, the story seems poised to go in any number of directions, before finally committing to an eerie, thriller-esque plot. And that plot is fine, but it's not actually what makes Perdido Street Station shine. It's the messiness of the whole thing, the many imaginative tangents Mieville is willing to take for the sake of atmosphere and immersion, and the hundreds of seemingly unimportant details he tosses out along the way.  The man is apparently a fountain of knockout ideas.  Any given ten pages of Perdido Street Station could have formed the whole concept behind another novel, but Mieville somehow finds room for them all here. I cannot stress enough how vividly imagined this book is; it's what I really loved about it.  The Weaver, the ribs, the Construct Council, the moths, the Ambassador, Torque and all the rich history that's dished out just for passing conversation — Mieville doesn't seem to mind whether his creations affect the plot for five pages or 500, they're all inventive and interesting and actually suck you into this impossible city.

Because really, this novel is about the city where it takes place more than any one component of its plot.  All those details and tangents that seem irrelevant, or tangential, are not.  By the end, the city of New Crobuzon seemed more likely and believable a place to me than, say, Detroit.  In another, broader sense — embracing the themes rather than specifics of the story — Perdido is about the state of crisis.  Multiple disparate events, each as unlikely as the one preceding it, all joining impossibly to propel things forward.  Perdido Street Station could have had a very simple plot.  If it was made as a movie, it would seem like a standard genre thriller that just happens to have an interesting gothic backdrop.  Only a book this long and rambling could capture that theme, the sense that chaos often coagulates in unlikely ways, driven by its very unexpectedness.

Of course, as a messy book, Perdido can't be perfect — just really impressive.  I thought some of the plot threads resolved in unsatisfactory ways, and the book is definitely at its best when it's introducing all its inventive ideas, rather than shutting them down toward the end. Still, for a book this dense, it sticks the landing far better than most. The characters are interesting, if not particularly memorable, and Mieville's writing is consistently excellent, matching the tone of this dark-fantasy steampunk sci-fi horror hodgepodge. (A sidenote that I'd like to address, even though it's not directly relevant to the review of the book:  Fantasy novels always seem to take place in some technologically frozen world, where society has remained static for hundreds or thousands of years, never advancing beyond Medieval sciences.  This is rarely explored or mentioned outright, and I'd love to see some more deconstruction of the reasons for this, other than plot-necessity.  It almost makes sense, really: the introduction of 'magic' to a world would confound science, or even replace it. I loved that Perdido Street Station addressed this indirectly, once more tossing off a brilliant idea as if it were nothing. The novel features a society that seems to have integrated what we'd call 'magic' as simply another branch of science, creating an industrial age society that's in many ways as advanced as our own, its wildly multi-cultural society progressing and developing while still laboring under an oppressive authoritarian government.  Once again, it's a subtle, creative blend of ideas, where steampunk technology and old-world ideals lead to slightly-weird union labor strikes as often than surreal adventures.)

I rate Perdido Street Station five out of five Orson-Welles-slow-clap.gifs.

THE RUNNING MAN (BY) STEPHEN KING

Published 1982, 336 pages
Characters: B
Writing: B-
Plot: B+
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: B

It's not terribly important that I decided to pick up the Running Man because I read countless discussions online pointing out its similarity to the currently-popular Hunger Games trilogy, which I read in March. But out of the dozens of novels Stephen King has written — which I will probably never entirely catch up on — that's why I decided to pick up this one just now.

Though nearly three decades separate the publication of the novels, the similarities are pretty glaring. The Hunger Games is an almost perfect synthesis of The Running Man and Battle Royale. Stephen King's 1982 novel is only set in 2025, and as with the best, most convincing near-future sci-fi, not much is all the different — everything is just a bit shittier. The people tune in to a series of increasingly dangerous reality-TV show contests for amusement, run by a sinister government entertainment Network. A man named Richards, desperate for money to save his diseased young daughter, enters into the most dangerous and popular reality program in the country: The Running Man. It's pretty much what it sounds like, a nationwide manhunt which nearly everyone watches, and in which anyone can participate. If Richards manages to survive for 30 days, he's set for life, rich beyond meaning. In the history of the game, no one has ever survived more than 8 days.

So you have the evil corrupt government, the death-game, the reality-TV angle being used to control and manipulate the masses. The main reason I bring up these comparisons is because The Hunger Games utilized that reality-TV angle so poorly, when it was clearly a goldmine idea with a lot of potential. It was never clear who watched or who cared or what significance any of it might have in the world at large. King clears that problem here, making it all feel tangible and believable, with plenty of first-hand demonstration on what effect this reality-TV population control has, and why people in a society like ours might even buy into it. He does this while breezing through the action of the novel, too, integrating exposition with pacing and plot development. It's impressive, and only the beginning of the novel suffers for it, with the first few beats of the story seeming a little rushed and jarring.

The world is convincing, and the story is tight. There's really not much beyond that — like The Hunger Games, this is a lean book and a fast read. (I read nearly the entire thing on a four hour bus ride back to Lebanon.) It's appropriately gritty and uncompromising, and Richards makes for a sympathetic, jaded, smug, noir-ish narrator. I should note that The Running Man was written under King's long-defunct Richard Bachman pen-name, and thus there are some interesting and fitting stylistic differences from King's usual stuff. The prose is much leaner and harder, less folksy and rambling than typical. Richard the character fits Richard the pen-name, and everything fits this grim but sardonic world.

One last thing: that Arnold Schwarzenegger film of the same name is, in fact, based off of this book. I have never seen it. I doubt it's very similar but I'm curious to check it out. King doesn't pull any punches with the ending, and without changing that part around significantly, this is one story I can guarantee that Hollywood will never be tempted to remake.

IN THE DOLL HOUSE (BY) DANDY LIONS

Indie / Pop / Gypsy Folk
2011, Self Released
Free Download: Bandcamp, last.fm

I'm always a sucker for male/female vocals, so I wasn't terribly surprised to find the Dandy Lion's songs frequently getting stuck in my head.  It's not particularly rare to find indie bands with dual male/female vocals these days, but few bands have such an instinctive knack for shaping songs around the strengths of those vocalists.  The brother/sister songwriters behind Dandy Lions — Dante and Lena DeLeo, joined by drummer Ben Goldstein and bassist John Feliciano — don't have the typical voices you'd expect from such a duo, either.  Their deep, forceful vocals and stretchy tricks of enunciation add to the unique vibe of this ethereal baroque pop, music that isn't afraid to wear its oddness on its sleeve even as it pushes an unashamed, unpretentious reliance on melody.

At first, I just accepted that the Dandy Lions were going to be much poppier than the dreary stuff I normally listen to.  While never depressing, the music is a bit moody — not melodramatic, and less stiff and awkward than other baroque sounding stuff, but there's a bit of a haunted edge creeping in.  Songs often come unhinged without warning, devolving into a chorus of shouts and frantic instrumentation, adding an off-kilter sense of unpredictability to what starts out as bouncy upbeat indie-folk. It's frenetic pop music with a surreal edge. Some bands successfully pull off quirk, and plenty of bands succeed with catchy accessibility, but both at once is a much rarer feat. The duality that forms the basis for the Dandy Lion's music somehow allows them to be both — accessible, and yet weird enough that you can't quite pin down whether you've heard anything like it before.

The vocals of the singers – which are themselves just a bit different, and yet entirely natural when balancing each other — provide the backbone. Dandy Lions take excellent advantage of the back-and-forth, male-and-female style, writing songs that compliment both voices, rather than just using one as seasoning for the other.  It's fine that most bands with male/female singers write like that: one vocalist dominant, the other joining here and there as a sort of lyrical accent. But these siblings' voices are a perfect fit, and their dependence on this good fortune shapes the album, giving it a sense of confidence and sincerity, a refreshing lack of cynicism and calculated aloofness.  Many recent indie bands passive-aggressively embrace their pop aspects, combining semi-catchy melodies with a stuffy twee sensibility that runs the risk of making the music feel stilted, and distant.  With the Dandy Lions, there's no awkward over-instrumentation or insecure dancing around the band's poppy nature. Everything contributes: those complimentary dual vocals, the forceful rhythm section, the rarely-dominant but never-superfluous accordion, which compliments the guitar with a similar playful back-and-forth as the musician's vocals, neither one truly leading the other. Goldstein and Feliciano provide genuine, pounding energy to match, pushing the music along at a speed that prevents any chance of it all seeming too-cute.

Bands that focus on melody often focus only on melody, which usually leads to me quickly losing interest.  Melody creates catchyness, but melody itself generally doesn't contribute to texture or depth. If the Dandy Lions didn't have a distinct personality — a moody duality and an off-center sense of unpredictability — they would be just another redundancy in the recent surge of quirky indie-pop bands, bands that make up for a lack of interesting songwriting by copping interesting musical trends. But nothing here is trying to be trendy, cute, or desperately different. Dandy Lions let their music carry itself with the confidence that their songwriting is interesting — and it is — rather than propping it up with splatters of semi-interesting flair to support a limp essence. Quirky charm like this works as well as it does because the band — for all their skill — gracefully lacks pretension.