Solange – Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams (Geffen Records). Toss in a dollop of Diana Ross, a spritz of Erykah Badu with just a hint of Nina Simone to make it sexy, and you’ll get a sense of Solange’s new release. Fun, funny, autobiographical, it’s retro without cynicism, Motown grooves and grownup beats from another planet. Solange takes on everything from men to the delicate confusions of getting stoned, not to mention artistic/familial identity, beating to the punch those critics tempted to measure her talents alongside that of her older sister, Beyonce. They needn’t bother: Solange is irrefutably her own woman as this stunning showcase attests.
Control – Anton Corbijn, director (The Weinstein Company). Ian Curtis follows a long line of artists (James Dean, Buddy Holly) who crashed and burned prematurely. Anton Corbijn’s compact, masterful study of The Joy Division and its lead singer’s fall is moody in all the right ways, its black-and-white palette a fitting metaphor for the hero’s bleak working-class origins, the harrowing depictions of Curtis’s epilepsy, and his attempts to manage it through hit-and-miss drug regimens and its devastating effect on his relationships and career. But mostly it’s an elegiac celebration of a sound whose influence on rock endures, and an explosive, brooding genius.
Fun Home – Alison Bechdel (Mariner Books). The fact that it’s a graphic novel isn’t what makes Alison Bechdel’s revelatory memoir about growing up in a funeral home with her mother, siblings and her erudite, closeted father such a dazzler, though without it (she is the author of the syndicated comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For), one would miss this artist’s wry, loopy visual depiction of the rural upstate where she grew up, and the encyclopedic ambivalence of faces that often convey more human truth than those of flesh and blood. But it’s her literary voice that makes Fun Home a must-read bildungsroman in this age of Proposition 8 and our morality wars: naked, full of wit and pain in its observance of one woman’s gay coming of age.