From The Desk Of Del Amitri’s Justin Currie: “The Thin Red Line”

There will always be a small bunch who will never forgive Justin Currie for the sins of his former band, Del Amitri. Namely, the speed and vigor with which the group abandoned the angular new-wave-ish promise of its 1985 self-titled debut for more conventional pop inroads. Currie makes no apologies for the 17 years and five albums of smart, well-executed, comparatively middle-of-the-road Brit Invasion melodies and country-rock yearnings that followed. It even netted him and his Scottish bandmates an American hit, “Roll To Me,” in 1995. Nowadays, Currie is still living in Glasgow while nurturing an intermittent solo career that now includes The Great War (Ryko). Coming eight years after Del Amitri’s last album, it resurrects the reassuring jangle of that band as it continues Currie’s middle-age explorations of the darker recesses of the male love muscle (i.e. the heart). Currie will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with him.

Currie: I know, I know. The Thin Red Line is a war movie. But fuck it, so is Henry V, right? What I really like about this is not the vast array of sterling performances by Nick Nolte, John Cusak, Sean Penn, Ben Chaplin, Woody Harrelson and Elias Koteas. It’s not the mesmerising editing and cinematography and not the ominous soundtrack. It’s the central theme of Darwinian struggle and the placing of a traditional war story into a discourse on that natural process. It’s both beautiful and shocking like the fact of natural selection itself, and I can even forgive Terrence Malick‘s ham-fisted flashbacks and pretentious multiple voiceovers because of the film’s adherence to its theme. The last line and its elegant and simple accompanying final shot are quite devastating: “All things shining.”

Video after the jump.