NEW MUSIC

Day 52: FISCHERSPOONER – Sir: Compelling, in a glum sort of way – meandering, thoughtful synth-pop outlining the late-night territories where desire, and weariness, and resentment of desire, and resentment of weariness, all run togethe[…]

This is late, and brief, as I’ve been in France helping my parents as my Dad’s been ill.
NEW MUSIC

Day 43: TAL NATIONAL – Tantabara: Pell-mell afro/jazz/rock from Niger, teetering on the line between exciting and exhausting. Everything sounds […]

NEW MUSIC

Day 36: ???? – Sekundenschlaf: Philip Sherburne’s Pitchfork review goes in deep on the enjoyably ridiculous backstory of this dude, how these are supposedly found tracks from the hard drive of a PC from the Chernobyl isolation zone or […]

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Day 29: JOHN SURMAN – Invisible Threads: Pastoral, ruminative jazz from an English composer and saxophonist. Very much a set of mood pieces, it seems to me, whose folky calm is upended at one point by a much brisker cover version. Chosen[…]

Datura, or a Delusion We All See by Leena Krohn
(Read as part of the Book Riot Readharder challenge 2018. Category: A single-sitting book.)
An anonymous woman in an anonymous (though clearly Nordic) city receives a flower for her birthday. She begins[…]

Hortus Vitae: Essays On The Gardening Of Life by Vernon Lee
(Read as part of the 2018 Read Harder challenge. Category: A book of essays.)
Vernon Lee, pseudonym of Violet Paget, was an essayist, story writer, and aesthete active in the late 19th and e[…]

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Day 24: FIRST AID KIT – Ruins: Slickly produced, occasionally countrified, notes on romantic disappointment by a pair of Swedish sisters who sing with a Nordics-meet-Nashville twang. There’s nothing off-putting or irritating about this[…]

Mark E Smith, 1957-2018. Some things to read.
My favourite ever piece or sequence of pieces on The Fall is our own Kat Stevens’ stint on One Week One Band. It’s very wide ranging, very funny, and especially perceptive about the different […]

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Day 19: FALL OUT BOY – Mania: Short, and making no secret of its modern pop inspiration (there’s a song here with a reggaeton beat!), Mania underlines Fall Out Boy’s flexibility and their continuity. Basically, they’re all about th[…]

Six to Sixteen: A Story for Girls by Juliana Horatia Ewing
Read as part of the Book Riot Read Harder 2018 Challenge (Category: “A children’s classic published before 1980”)
She’s no relation, but I’ve always had a curios[…]