Assholes Finish First
By Tucker Max
Gallery Press, 404pp, $US39.99

In 2006, American writer Tucker Max published I Hope they Serve Beer in Hell, a collection of nonfiction stories that revolved around boozing and sex.

Max was hailed as a pioneer of “fratire”, a masculine answer to chick lit, his book sold more than a million copies worldwide and was made into a film.

His follow-up, Assholes Finish First, is split into two sections. In the first we are in familiar territory as Max relives more sex-and-booze stories from his college days, taking us up to the release of his first book. The second section carried a self-explanatory title: “Post-Fame Sex Stories”.

Max hasn’t taken his rise to fame with particular grace: he details his early attempts to get published, describing how the stories that “eventually anchored” a No. 1 bestseller “got precisely ZERO interest from the very people whose only job is to discover new talent”.

Undiscouraged — “I’m a narcissist and a genius, and I knew what I had on my hands” — Max put the stories on his website for free, where their popularity soon attracted publishing houses.

While the genius tag is a bit much, Max has an immersive style that hurls the reader into the centre of the maelstrom. His writing has tightened up: there are fewer offhand comments, leaving more streamlined stories, told at a whirlwind pace.

The TuckerFest Story, the 60-page centrepiece, is the best example. It details Max’s first sniff of celebrity in 2003: a road trip from Chicago to New Jersey to judge a bikini contest at a wrestling show.

‘First Listen’ ruminates on forthcoming records we’re excited about – penned before their release date and whilst still drunk with the confusing hot flush of first impressions. Previously: The National. M.I.A. Arcade Fire. Matthew Dear.

–

Cut Copy
Zonoscope
(Modular Recordings)

Release date: February 4th 2011

Three years after Cut Copy’s breakthrough second album, In Ghost Colours, comes the much anticipated follow up in Zonoscope. Now a fully-fledged four-piece, there’s a lot riding on this release for the Melbourne-based act. Such as, “Do people still care?”.

But upon hearing the disco throb of opener ‘Need You Now’, there’s no initial announcement of urgency on the band’s part. The track doesn’t so much reach a climax as maintain an insistent rhythm across six slow-burning minutes. This is a new tact for Cut Copy. The hooks of In Ghost Colours were built around verse escalation toward euphoric choruses; remember the way that they stripped everything back for those few seconds before reaching the chorus of ‘Lights And Music’? That doesn’t happen here. This is disorienting at first. ‘Need You Now’ is a crafty opener, because it confounds expectations. It reveals that the quartet hold higher aspirations than what they’ve achieved thus far, as – alongside The Presets – Australia’s chief synthpop proponents.

So it’s with some disappointment that Zonoscope’s next track, ‘Take Me Over’, follows that established formula of leaving a bar of vocal silence before launching into a chorus that’ll sound most at home sung by thousands-strong audiences. There’s the familiar echoes of swooning “oohs” that colour the song’s backdrop; the same they worked throughout In Ghost Colours, so much so that they’ve become something of an integral part of the band’s sound. The song’s familiarity – its sheer Cut Copy-ness – acts as a buffer between the system-shock of the opener, and the blatant pop of ‘Where I’m Going’, which was first released for free via the band’s website in late 2010. The latter track’s mood is ebullient, contagious; it’s difficult to shake the image of the band members yelling “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Woo!” while fist-pumping at their triumphant Parklife 2010 headline spot.