My Pop Year: SYD – “Know”

On first listen I liked Syd’s Fin mainly for its Spartan vibe: low-key, late-night R&B synths. Moody and pleasant. My second listen was like my eyes were adjusting to a dark room – songs emerged as ultraviolet blooms. The one that jumped out most was “Know”. How could a track this full of tension and subtle incident have seemed just part of a whole?

My Pop Year: MARA BALLS – “Elävä kivi”

Not the last Finnophone musician I’ll be writing about, Mara Balls is the rock-name of musician and artist Maria Mattila, who’s done stints in a few Finnish hard rock bands and also ran the Yellow House, an underground venue and cultural space in Tampere. As Mara Balls, she makes what I guess would be stoner and desert rock, except I don’t really listen to stoner and desert rock, so I have to find my own reference points: the psychedelic paganism of Julian Cope, maybe. Or more accurately, something Julian Cope would get very excited about.

My Pop Year: IBIBIO SOUND MACHINE – “The Chant (Iquo Isang)”

There seems to be a lot of music around at the moment involving a fusion of more acoustic – I don’t want to say ‘traditional’ – African musics, or African vocal pop traditions, and electronic production. Of course a hell of a lot of contemporary African pop already is hip-deep in ‘electronic production’, if by that you mean hip-hop, EDM, autotune, etc. But that’s not the stuff I’m talking about, which tends to look a few decades back on both sides of the equation, sounding a bit like a collision between a Rough Guide CD and a Warp Records compilation.

My Pop Year: KEDR LIVANSKIY – “Ariadna”

One of the great dangers of listening to music from around the world – as you’ll see, it’s a danger I fall foul of a LOT – is a kind of geographical determinism, At home I’m a tourist, projecting my misty sense of a place I’ve never been onto the music I’m hearing. All I need to know is that Kedr Livanskiy is a young woman from Moscow and bang, I’m off, letting the sound conjure up mountains of snow, roads lined with decaying concrete flats, lives of brittle hedonism and bitter suspicion, and whatever other borrowed images my head’s filled up with since I first saw the video for Elton John’s “Nikita”.

In my defense, the music makes this nonsense a lot easier by being goth as hell. Livanskiy takes rhythms from the 80s and 90s – the dry snap of the drums under “Ariadna” reminds me a lot of vintage electro – and wreaths them in clouds of gloomy synth and a keening, fatalistic sounding multi-tracked vocal. The overall vibe this creates is a kind of hopeless momentum, the drums kicking the song forward as Livansky’s sepulchral vocals swathe them in mourning black. There are lots of ways this could go wrong – beats a little too retro, velvet drapes a bit too smothering, references crossing the line into corny, but mostly her Ariadna LP gets the balance right, and this title track certainly does.

WILL YOUNG – “Light My Fire”

#929, 8th June 2002

It’s hardly unusual for a reality TV star to try and cement their precarious fame with a cover version. Will Young’s puckish take on “Light My Fire”, a cover of Jose Feliciano’s cover of Jim Morrison’s signature come-on, is particularly well-taken. His verse delivery is enjoyably arch, keeping a distance between himself and the hoary material, but he gives enough of an impression of losing himself in the chorus for it not to be a total mickey-take. The overall impression is of an unusually honest take on contractual obligation – “I know this is how the game is played, and I’m going to play it, but I’m not going to con you, so let’s make this as fun as we can.”

gerald’s game, or fewer things in heaven and earth

(Warning: SPOILERS.)

First: I shd note immediately that I’ve read no Stephen King and only fully watched a few of the films (Carrie of course and lol The Shining; several more half-watched at best). My perhaps ill-informed nugget of knowledge is that he returns, over and over, to the notion that some cartoon monsters are also extremely real and here’s how. In that sense, Gerald’s Game is a very King project, exploring a potentially interesting extra twist. Except sadly the book it’s based on is one most King fans dislike and many never finished.

First things first: While the initial set-up was nicely fashioned — a sense of place and context, a sense of unease — the main characters we immediately meet, the primary couple, Jessie (Carla Gugino) and Gerald (Bruce Greenwood), weren’t really people I took much pleasure in spending time with. They are spending a weekend in the woods to rekindle their failing marriage, via the questionable medium Gerald’s BDSM games — which Jessie immediately reacts against and wants out of.

All 151 Original Pokemon Ranked From Worst To Best By Drake (Age 8)

(This article was transcribed by me, Drake’s Dad, over a series of Sunday conversations. We counted evolutionary lines as a single Pokemon for space and patience reasons.)

151. MR. MIME (Mr. Mime)

CREEEEEEEEEEEP.

EMINEM – “Without Me”

#928, 1st June 2002

Eminem produced “Without Me” himself, and the sound of this song is the best thing about it, a thick, soupy, snaky bassline and a brutally four-square beat. Ironic that this is the record where he calls out Moby – “nobody listens to techno!” – as the goonish thunk of “Without Me” is the most robotic version of Marshall Mathers yet. And the least funky, not coincidentally. It’s a production stripped back to make more space for Eminem’s tongue-twisting insults, and to be as legible as possible to the army of new, white hip-hop fans he’s presuming are out there, waiting out a turgid pop landscape until their rascal prince returns.

The Dan

Walter Becker of Steely Dan died the week before last, and so I spent last week listening to each of their seven LPs, one a day. “The rim of salt around the cocktail of my taste”, I called them on Facebook: this last week I’ve been amazed all over again by how much I enjoy them and by how divisive they are (particularly among US listeners, where they seem to be a real line in the sand, even though most of my own connections there are strongly pro-Dan).

This is a playlist I made, three tracks from each of their albums. Not necessarily my all time favourites, just the songs that stood out to me most this time through the catalogue. RIP, Walter Becker.

Love And Rockets: Notes On A Re-Reading (I)

Repurposed and edited Goodreads reviews of the Love And Rockets Library (by Los Bros Hernandez; published by Fantagraphics).

Heartbreak Soup (Gilbert Hernandez)

This is my third or fourth time reading these stories, but the first for a decade or so. No criticism here – these are foundational for me, some of my favourite ever comics. The first time I read the early stories here – 25 years ago now – I remember feeling a little sad at how quickly Gilbert Hernandez moved time forward. The world of the first Palomar story was so charming I wanted to stay there longer – but time and change, the steady accretion of consequences and histories, is the essence of both sides of Love And Rockets.