Brooklyn quartet begins April residency on Lower East Side on April 6
Fontana’s
105 Eldridge St. between Broome & Grand Sts.
Tuesday nights in April, $6, 7:00
212-334-6740
www.myspace.com/cruelblackdove
www.fontanasnyc.com
In the first single off their new release, THE MYTH AND THE SUM, Brooklyn’s Cruel Black Dove announces, “Isolation feels right,” and so does just about everything else on this five-track EP. More atmospheric and moodier than their 2008 debut, FULL POWERS, the new album features sexy dance grooves oozing through haunting vocals kept slightly back in the mix on such songs as “Forgotten Place” and “Isolation.” Layered vocals lift the beautiful “Raking Water,” leading to the dark, languid closer, “Tied to the Pavement.” Lead singer Anastasia Dimou, guitarist Alan Veucasovic, bassist Shirley Ho, and drummer Jonathan Nanberg begin a Tuesday residency tonight at Fontana’s, with such guests as Saadi on April 6, the Danvilles on April 20, and Open Ocean on April 27. At Santos Party House celebrating the album’s release in January, CBD covered the Stooges’ “Gimme Danger”; who knows what they have up their sleeves during this four-show residency on the Lower East Side.
After the orchestra in which he plays cello is dissolved, Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) and his wife, Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) leave Tokyo and head back to his hometown in Yamagata. Seeing a classified ad in the local paper listing a job in “departures,” Daigo schedules an interview, thinking it is a travel agent position. But as it turns out, the boss, Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki), claims it was a typo — it should have read “the departed” — and immediately hires Daigo as his assistant encoffinor. Daigo quickly learns that he and Sasaki attend to the newly dead, picking them up for funeral directors and then preparing the bodies, in front of grieving friends and family, for the coffins and cremation through an elaborate, detailed ceremony. Daigo takes the job out of financial desperation — Sasaki throws money at him to come on board — but doesn’t tell anyone, including Mika, what he is doing, since people who work in businesses involving corpses are shunned in Japan, considered dirty. But as Daigo grows to appreciate the importance of what Sasaki does, everything he has built threatens to fall apart when his secret starts getting out. Winner of the 2008 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film (As well as ten Japan Academy Prizes), DEPARTURES is a moving portrait of life and death, told beautifully by director Yojiro Takita (WHENT THE LAST SWORD IS DRAWN, ONMYOJI) and screenwriter Kundo Koyama. Motoki, who had the original idea for the film, gives a wonderfully subtle performance as a Daigo, while Yamazaki is a riot as the stern boss with a sly sense of humor. Despite an embarrassingly unnecessary montage scene and sappy music by Joe Hisaishi (who’s never met an emotion he couldn’t overexploit), DEPARTURES is a moving portrait of a man searching for his place in the world — and meeting personal and professional obstacles when he thinks he might have found it.
