Ten Low has been on my TBR for ages, but I just haven’t been able to find it anywhere, for some reason—not my library, not any bookstores I’ve been to around where I live…until, somehow, it turns out that the Barnes & Noble in my college town had it! Naturally, I got myself a copy, and it was worth the read—brutal and cinematic all at once.
Ten Low is stranded. After defecting from the war effort, she made a desperate escape to a planet where she thought no one could find her. But trouble has found her already, in the form of Gabriella Ortiz—an unseemly thirteen-year-old girl on the outside, but in reality, the next incarnation of the tyrannical General that Ten once served under. Neither of them want to face the realities of their involvement in the war, but they have no choice: outside forces want them both dead, and Ten and Gabi must endure a treacherous desert full of bloodthirsty Seekers and threats on all sides if they want to get out of this alive…
TW/CW: graphic violence, war themes, blood, gore, descriptions of corpses, torture, child soldiers
Like superhero fatigue, I feel like there’s a case to make among sci-fi fans for a very specific fatigue for desert planets. Star Wars and Dune set the blueprints, but ever since, they’ve been…everywhere. (Tatooine was good once, but…can somebody tell Disney that they could’ve just stopped at one or two desert planets?) Ten Low was one of the few books where I feel like there was an original spin on it—and a lot of aspects of this novel can be boiled down to the same things: seemingly plain plot elements that were twisted into something fascinating.
Back to the desert planet aspect…even though there are altogether too many of them and often without original components (or, again, just aspects that were lifted from Dune or Star Wars), but Ten Low really couldn’t have been set anywhere else. Nowhere else could the harshness of the obstacles facing Ten and Gabi could have been harsher, and nowhere else could their struggle have been more palpable. I didn’t go in knowing that Ten Low was something of a space Western, which made the desert feel all the more fitting for the genre. Holborn didn’t just fill the place with sand and leave it at that; the desert, along with its many inhabitants, felt like a real hurdle that the characters had to overcome and work around, and not just a place to signal science fiction. I can’t help it—I’m a sucker for when the setting is just as inhospitable as the hardships that the characters are experiencing. I just re-read The Left Hand of Darkness, you can’t fault me for that.
As with the oft-used desert planet, Ten Low has a common trope in space Westerns in particular—pairing a tough, hardened adult character with a child that they have to drag along. (Anybody heard of a little show called The Mandalorian? Pretty indie, I know.) I already like the trope as is, so I wouldn’t have a problem if there wasn’t necessarily the most original take on it, as long as the characters could each pull their emotional weight and make me feel invested in the story. But what do you do when said child is a thirteen-year-old embedded with the consciousness of a dead, fascist general? And you happen to have been a medic that defected from said general’s army after witnessing the litany of crimes committed under her tyrannical reign? I loved how complicated that relationship got—not just because there’s nothing more unsettling than a thirteen-year-old girl who’s quite literally a warmonger with a list of crimes that could circle the planet twice, but because of how their relationship developed. Through their trek through the desert, there’s no “forgive and forget” resolution—and I’m glad Holborn strayed away from that, given what the General did to Ten and everybody else—but the commonality that neither of them wanted to be in their situations made their relationship so much stronger, and also that both of them were subject to horrors beyond their control.
Ten Low moves fast, and had it not been for Holborn’s cinematic writing style, I would have probably gotten lost somewhere along the way. But Holborn’s writing thoroughly kept me grounded, and it enhanced my reading experience immensely. Like any Western, there’s a rapidly rotating cast of characters and all manner of foes along the treacherous road that Ten, Gabi, and the others had to travel; although I’ll say more about said rotating cast, what Holborn excelled at was the balance between action and character development. It’s a hard balance to hit, but there was enough down time between Ten getting out of horrific scrapes for the two protagonists to actually react, change, and strengthen their relationships. The fight scenes didn’t go on for extensive periods (although they easily could have), but the quieter, more character-driven moments didn’t dominate the narrative either.
However, I can’t say the same for the characters. I get that it’s a staple of Westerns in general to have a cast that constantly shifts and changes, but given that most of the characters that were introduced in Ten Low eventually came back in some way, shape, or form, it was kind of a handful to juggle every single one of their names and significances, especially since their first appearances were a flash in the pan. Not only did that make them difficult to keep track of, it dulled the emotional weight when we were supposed to mourn their deaths—somebody dies, and all I found myself thinking of was “wait, who was that again? Why do we care?” That being said, Holborn at least made them all colorful and at least fun while they had their brief moments in the spotlight—they were fun, but not much else, unfortunately. Ten and Gabi’s relationship was the centerpiece, and that’s exactly how it should have been.
All in all, a gritty, action-packed space Western with tropes turned on their heads in surprising—and incredibly entertaining—ways. 4 stars!
Ten Low is the first book in the Ten Low trilogy, followed by Hel’s Eight and the forthcoming Ninth Life. . Stark Holborn is also the author of the 12-book Nunslinger series, as well as the Triggernometry duology, which is set in the same universe.
Today’s song:
ALL BORN SCREAMING ON FRIDAY HHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
I was honestly so surprised that I hadn’t done this tag before—I found it, like I do most of my tags these days, on The Corner of Laura, and the tag was originally created by A Books Neverland.
Let’s begin, shall we?
🔟TEN BOOKISH QUESTIONS TAG🔟
HOW MANY BOOKS DO YOU CURRENTLY OWN?
…I don’t know the exact number, but certainly more than I have space for…
HOW MANY BOOKS ARE YOU CURRENTLY READING?
Normally, I stick to one book at a time, but since I’m often reading for other classes, it usually ends up being two or three at this time of the school year. Right now, I’m currently reading Ten Lowand re-reading The Left Hand of Darknessfor one of my classes.
CHOOSE A COUPLE OF BOOKS YOU READ BUT DIDN’T ENJOY.
I just chose a handful here that I’ve read (somewhat) recently and didn’t enjoy:
Only a Monster – Vanessa Len | I really, really wanted there to be some nuance, but no. Apparently we just had to have the themes beaten into our heads with a crowbar.
Frontier – Grace Curtis | for the fascinating premise it had, this novel just felt so…boring? For a book with the tagline of “love. loss. laser guns,” you’d think there would be more action, but every plot point just blurred into the next.
The Sevenfold Hunters – Rose Egal | this was my first DNF of the year, but it was more out of a feeling of “I have neither the time nor the will to read any more of this” than “I hate this book with a passion.” Even still, there were a lot of problems I had with what I read—mainly the implausibility of everything happening to the characters (and them emerging almost unscathed every time) and the sin of listing off every single character’s sexualities instead of organically weaving in their representation in a way that didn’t feel like checking off boxes.
A COVER BUY?
I put off reading Firekeeper’s Daughterfor quite some time, but after reading Warrior Girl Unearthed, I was fully convinced to buy this one…but the cover was a significant part of the sell. Absolutely gorgeous design, isn’t it?
A BOOK YOU OWN BUT HATE THE COVER OF?
I don’t hate the cover of Ammonite, but it kind of screams “graphic design is my passion,” y’know? Gotta love the ’90s.
A BOOK YOU HAVEN’T READ IN YEARS?
It’s been at least a decade since I’ve picked up any of the Warriorsbooks, but those consumed my life from 3rd to 5th grade like nothing else had before…god, those were the days. Nothing like cats violating every single term of the Geneva Conventions for some after-school reading.
A BOOK YOU WILL ALWAYS RECOMMEND?
Every time I go to any bookstore with friends, I inevitably try to steer them over to this one. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is truly special. I swear.
ALL TIME FAVORITE BOOK SERIES?
Y’all already know the answer to this one…
WHERE DO YOU READ?
Mostly in bed or on the couch, but when the weather’s warm, I read outside, and when the weather’s cold, I read in the campus coffee shops.
I TAG ANYONE WHO WANTS TO PARTICIPATE!
Today’s song:
That’s it for this book tag! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
Note: this isn’t the official music video (there isn’t one), but it is in my eyes. Somebody just put this song in the background of videos of their cats in 2009. And they’re some friggin’ cute cats. I miss the days when YouTube used to be a simple, wholesome place…
I would have talked about this album…oh, a good three weeks ago, but I stubbornly made several color palettes that didn’t match Her Wallpaper Reverie at all, so I’ve regretfully withheld from it until now. Somehow, it was only the second Apples in Stereo album that I’ve listened to all the way through (the first was Travellers in Space and Time, but that was ages ago, so this felt like the first), and it’s just about the jangliest, summeriest (glad that’s actually a word) album I’ve heard in ages. By then, Robert Schneider and company had carefully chiseled their craft so that everything sounded like either a lost Beach Boys demo, some kind of space-age, robot dance break, or somewhere in between. (You’d be surprised at the commonalities between the two. They make it work.) You’ve got the cut-and-dry indie, almost Pavement-like “Benefits of Lying (With Your Friend)” on one end, and “Drifting Patterns,” a thicket-dense, borderline anxiety-inducing instrumental that sounds like it should be playing in the entry hallway to the space exhibit in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science on the other, but there’s no sense that either are out of place; strung together by a sprinkling of instrumental bites that clock in at less than a minute long, Her Wallpaper Reverie just feels like a showcase of the exact range that The Apples in Stereo are all about.
“Questions and Answers” stood out as a favorite for me—it’s squarely on the “we’re making the jangliest jangle-pop song known to man and we cannot be stopped” side of The Apples in Stereo, but you know me. I’m eating it up. It’s such a shame that Hilarie Sidney, their longtime drummer, left the band in the first place (but it’s understandable, given that she’d just recently divorced Schneider), but I find myself wishing that they’d lent her more opportunities for her to have lead vocals (see also: “Sunndal Song” and “Stay Gold”). She has a command of her voice in such a similar way to Schneider that they both could fit into any song he wrote; they both have a nasally quality that never grates—it just would feel weird for an Apples in Stereo song to not be nasally sung, somehow. But in this case, Sidney was the better choice to lead “Questions and Answers”; as much as I love Schneider, I can’t quite see him getting quite the same vocal sway and tightness that Sidney brings here. Maybe that’s because I’m having trouble envisioning him singing in the same key that Sidney is singing in, but I swear that “Questions and Answers” wouldn’t be the same without the way that she stretches the vowels in “moon” out like taffy in the hot sun or her unrelenting devotion to this song’s impressively airtight rhythm.
Yup. Sorry. Get ready for some more Elephant 6-posting this week. Sometimes the urge just overcomes me.
Elephant 6, in terms of its bands, tended to cross-pollinate quite a bit: chances are, if you take any given band from there, at least three members of said band will have been in or formed other bands on their own, also in Elephant 6. Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel fame was, for a time, in The Apples in Stereo, as was Bill Doss (rest easy), who was half of the brains behind The Olivia Tremor Control. It branches inwards infinitely. Circulatory System was an offshoot of The Olivia Tremor Control, fronted by Will Cullen Hart, and…I hesitate to outright call it Olivia Tremor Control 2: Electric Boogaloo (2 Tremor 2 Control), because that really isn’t a complaint on my part. We need more bands like The Olivia Tremor Control, and we need more of their sense of…well, fun. “Yesterday’s World” is glee cleverly disguised as a serious, psychedelic shredder. Yes, you’ve got the churning guitars, but woven in between them is a chorus of young kids (who faintly go off-script in the background), a quivering assembly of woodwinds, and marching band-like drums towards the end. With the lyrics factored in, I can’t help but think that these childlike elements were stirred in to nail in this desire: “Yesterday feels/Feels just so far away/From these days.” At the age that I’m at, I’ve been frequently grappling with the same thing; now, more than ever, I am both physically and chronologically distanced from the freedom of youth, but there’s also the growing “get a job/move out/etc.” pressure of age and capitalism. Such a fun age. Time moved too quickly for me to grasp that those days wouldn’t last forever. I’m glad I tried to train myself at 18 into knowing that age doesn’t mean that the joy gets sledgehammered out of you the minute you become an adult, but it’s an ongoing process, and I’d be lying if I said that I’d mastered it. For now, all I can do is the same of what Circulatory System are doing: integrate those moments of childhood and freedom into my newly adult life. They have their chorus of smiling, jumping kids within their music, and I’ve got the battered copies of my favorite book series from elementary school on my dorm bookshelf. Yesterday’s world isn’t always out of reach, even as we must live in the world of the present. Keep the kiddo alive.
Seems that rock n’ roll, as a collective, has come to the conclusion that this is where Jesus has been chilling out all this time: as Robyn Hitchcock put it, “out on the rim of space.” Seems that Supergrass also came to the appropriate conclusion about how Jesus would feel if he were to see the state of the world as it is now: disappointed. (Remind me again of which part of the Bible told you to harass trans kids? Oh, you can’t find it? How strange…) At least, if anything, we can take this message with us, whether or not it’s delivered from Jesus or Gaz Coombes: “Love is all, love is tall, love is older than you/Love’ll talk, love’ll walk, love’ll speak up for you/Love’ll shake, love’ll wake, love’ll wake up with you.”
Through only a handful of songs, it seems to me that Indigo De Souza has mastered the art of being really, truly, messy. It’s not just messy through a few sparing, self-deprecating lyrics about how far you’ve dug yourself into a sinkhole of misery. No—there’s some of that, but if there’s anything that her music does, it’s drag you right along with it, in all of its exhausted, cake-smushing glory. Riddled with aftershocks of a breakup, “Kill Me” crawls along the floor on its hands and knees, snuffling for scraps amongst the rubble, searching for something to hold onto. Oscillating between said “kill me” refrain in its handful of variations and a poisoned urge to crawl straight back to the person who caused all this strife, it’s a song, like “What Are We Gonna Do Now,” that feels like a frozen time capsule: minutes after the phone call that ended things, tear stained, dirty-clothed, and desperate—for answers, for comfort, and for reciprocation. It’s a raw-throated kind of desperation, but one that replicates the feeling of looking down at yourself in your grease-stained shirt and asking yourself what the hell happened to me? There’s a sardonic humor in the way that De Souza declares: “No one asked me/To feel this fucked up/But here I am, fucked up,” an exhausted chorus barking out the final “fucked up” along with her. “Kill Me” moves along like paint spilled on the floor, seeping into the floorboards no matter how much you try to scrape it out, muddying into an ugly mess of what used to be good colors into the woodgrain.
Following on my unintentional train from Lisa Hannigan’s “What’ll I Do” last week, here’s another lighthearted breakup song. Unlike Hannigan, it’s not so much laughing through the pain, but this one laughs more at an aspect of breakups that not enough songs talk about—the pets that get dragged into it. It’s a fact of life: sometimes toxic people have really lovable pets. They’re innocent. They didn’t have to get into this mess, but here we are. Granted, it is slightly weird that Addison Grace basically treats said dog like it’s a child that he’s battling for custody over, but it adds to the humor. It’s just a silly song through and through, from the bait-and-switch parentheses in the title to the purposefully placed sound effects (“I’m sure you told all your friends that you think I’m a [dog bark]”…ba-dumtsssss). And for all of the breakup songs wallowing in self-pity, sometimes all you can do in that situation is laugh and fixate on the silly parts. Or, if you’re Addison Grace, get it through to said ex that their dog deserves a birthday befitting a king.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Radio Silence – Alice Oseman – this one isn’t specific to this book, but more Oseman’s larger universe—given how much music seems to inform her creative process, this song is just begging to be included somewhere in it. Feels in line with her penchant for cheery but emotional indie pop.
Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.
That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
Happy & You Know It was a book that’s outside of my usual reading comfort zone—I’m not usually a realistic fiction person, and it seemed literary, though it didn’t end up being very much so. Either way, the premise was enough to grab me out of my sci-fi/fantasy stint, and though it wasn’t executed the way I wanted it to be, Happy & You Know It was still a biting and entertaining piece of satire.
Claire Martin has been unceremoniously thrown into the lowest point in her life. After her band, Vagabond, replaces her and rockets to stardom not long after, she’s left with fewer and fewer options to keep a job—and pay the rent in New York City. But when the opportunity presents itself to become a playgroup musician for a cohort of rich, Manhattan moms, Claire jumps at the chance—she’ll be paid for music again, even if it’s just singing nursery rhymes, and they’ll surely pay her exorbitantly. Claire is thrust into a world of mommy influencers, babies that are too well-dressed for their own good, and a multitude of secrets. This playgroup isn’t what it seems—and Claire may have been sucked into their whirlwind of lies too late…
TW/CW: substance abuse, cheating/affairs
Given the first page, I was expecting for Happy & You Know It to be a wilder ride than it actually was, but that’s not to say that it was a bad novel. Though I feel like the plot didn’t reach its full potential, it was still a fantastic piece of satire—biting, timely, and hilarious at all the right times.
The gauntlet you always have to run when writing satire—or any genre, honestly—that’s somehow involved with social media is making it sound realistic. Too often, authors heavily force a hand of making sure the characters use all of the right slang and terminology, and end up falling headfirst into what looks like a boomer’s distorted vision of the internet and how it operates. I was bracing myself for Happy & YouKnow It to have some of those trappings, but thankfully, none of that was to be found! Hankin’s depiction of this inner circle of rich, Manhattan mommy influencers felt scarily true to how such figures act, from the curation of every little aspect of their lives down to the tone-deaf, over-the-top names for their babies. It was ridiculous, but that was precisely the point—those kinds of influencers who treat their growing babies like playthings for them to dress up so they can get more likes is ridiculous, and Hankin clearly understood how twisted it gets when these behaviors are pushed to the extreme.
Claire was a perfect protagonist for Happy & You Know It: an outsider who is morbidly enchanted by this world of kale smoothies and sponsorships, but is so desperate that she falls in too deep just when she realizes how right her instincts were about the morbid part. Hankin did a fantastic job of detailing all of her motivations—given the care that was put into crafting her extensive backstory with her former band and the constant, emotional reminders she gets from their stardom, almost all of what she did made sense. She’s just the kind of person who thinks that she’s smart enough to run from a dangerous situation, but cornered enough to convince herself that she can make it out unscathed. I almost with that this novel was entirely from her perspective, and we didn’t get the POV shifts from most of the playgroup mom—I guess we wouldn’t have explicitly seen the details about Whitney and Christopher’s affair, but I’m sure there’s a way that it could have been revealed. The less we knew about the moms, I think, the better.
Perhaps that was part of what made the initial reveal about the true nature of the TrueMommy supplements (no spoilers) fall slightly flat—part of it may have been that it was a bit predictable, but part of it was that we knew too much about the rest of the moms. By the time that this reveal kicks in past the halfway point, my Spider-sense was already tingling—too much for how far into the novel it was. This amount of time should’ve been enough to ramp up the suspense, but I feel like I saw too much into their heads, and therefore, had a good guess of what the first twist was going to be. Especially since we only got some of the moms’ perspectives (Whitney, Gwen, and Amara), I feel like the balance was off. With Claire as an “outsider looking in” protagonist, it would have worked so much better if that secrecy was also confined to her POV—and nailed in that feel of the novel.
On that subject, given how gloriously over-the-top the introduction was, I expected the culmination of said twist to be a lot more dramatic than it was. It looked so messy from the start, and yet the ending felt wrapped up far too neatly—just a moment of confrontation, and then a time skip where everyone is (mostly) living happily ever after in wake of this supposedly drastic revelation. The one red herring we sort of got felt too obvious, and so it was easy to point to the real perpetrator, which dampened the effect. The setup didn’t match the end result—I guess I did want more of a disastrous downfall for almost all parties involved (can you tell I like Fargo?), but if you specifically have an introduction to hint at some spectacle of corruption and ruin, it needs to deliver—and unfortunately, Happy & You Know It missed the mark on that front.
All in all, a slightly disappointing mystery, but a deeply fulfilling and sharp satire. 3.5 stars!
Happy & You Know It is a standalone, but Laura Hankin is also the author of The Daydreams, A Special Place for Women, and the forthcoming One-Star Romance.
Today’s song:
aaaaaaaaaaand that’s another album added straight to my bucket list
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
A small but vibrant joy of life: songs coming back to you when you least expect them to. Not long ago, I just had a fleeting memory of the chorus, and so I went back through Passenger to try and find the exact song (because I was not about to google “Lisa Hannigan song that goes oh oh oh oh eh eh ah ah ah eh eh”). Luckily, it didn’t take much digging, and now I have this parcel of dancing happiness.
One of the top YouTube comments on the music video for “What’ll I Do” calls this song “the happiest sad song ever,” and there’s really no other way to describe it. Lisa Hannigan does have a penchant for belting out her melancholy, but this one somehow feels happy, even though it’s about a breakup; the lyrics are like watching an slapstick comedy where miserable event after comically miserable event starts crashing down on the protagonist (“What’ll I do now that you’re gone?/My boat won’t row, my bus doesn’t come/And I have the fingers, you’ve got the thumb”), but somehow, they’re smiling through the pain, and clicking their heels for the heck of it. “What’ll I Do” sits squarely at the point where so many bad things have happened to you that you just have to laugh—there’s no use in being miserable anymore, so why not just have a laugh at yourself and do a silly little dance? And Hannigan has juiced that emotion out in barrels, making this circus of bad luck into a full-on show, a folksy singalong that’s begging for a line of cheerful dancers. I wouldn’t complain about that for the music video, but the one that we do have is hilariously fitting as well—seemingly filmed from a phone, the whole video is Hannigan singing the song while on a rollercoaster; the camera shakes incessantly, and she has to break the lip sync at least twice just so she can grab her hat before it flies away. (I get it. We’ve all been there. Currently thinking about this Hello Kitty baseball cap that fell off while I went to Legoland that one time. I never forgot about you…) Like the lyrics, it’s a rollercoaster that’s already dragged you around and thrown you up in the air, making you want to puke, but there’s nothing left to do but have a laugh until the ordeal is over.
Crumb? Making somewhat uptempo music? It’s more likely than you think.
…I actually mean that seriously, for once. Other than a handful of songs off of their last album, Ice Melt, Crumb has been known for their calm—gentle, electronic dream-pop melodies that drifted along like the bubbles in a can of soda, and tasted of that same sweetness. At least, that’s how I think of their music—in the past few years, they’ve been the band that my mom puts on when she needs to focus on her (incredible!) art, or just do some cleaning—any task that necessitates some calming of the brain. Crumb have recently announced the release of their third album, AMAMA, which is set to release just over a month from now (!!)—May 17. I initially missed “Dust Bunny” when it was released as a single last year, but now that I’ve listened to it alongside “AMAMA” and “Crushxd,” it seems like some sort of shift is on the way for the band…even if it is just the tempo. “Dust Bunny” has picked up the pace, letting the drums take the wheel as the frantic energy blossoms from the (always plentiful) synths. As evidenced by the underwater-sounding effects on both the instrumentation and Lila Ramani’s voice, they’ve never lost that wooziness that coated their earlier songs like syrup (see “Locket”), but the molasses has melted enough to allow for their constant wiggling to speed up. The lyrics, too, feel like a far cry from “I don’t have class/Got a lot of time on my hands/To sit, wait around…”; just as with the music, Ramani recalls a vignette of panic and guilt: “You’re seeing a ghost/Can’t undo what’s been done/Forever no more/Stacks of clothing fill your room, you/Can’t find one thing to return.” Despite the spaciness of the synths, there’s no doubt that it’s morphed from danceable upbeat to the kind of upbeat that’s only so because it soundtracks the search for your sprinting around the house to try and find your keys 5 minutes after you were supposed to leave for work; or, if we’re sticking to the metaphor, trying to get that one dust bunnyout of your dorm before your RA comes to do a room inspection so that they don’t think you’ve been living in a pigsty this whole time. But that panic never overwhelms the music—being so cloaked in color-changing mist and melting shapes as it is, it’s still the same ol’ Crumb deep down.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
And Other Mistakes – Erika Turner – reconciling with the weight of your past actions and other people’s perceptions takes center stage in this novel.
Yet another infectious earworm that I have my dad to thank for, and also, I can definitively say that I’ve found it: my favorite band name. I mean, come on. Pop Will Eat Itself? How true is that? And doesn’t it just sound so cool as a name?
If you’re expecting their songs to be a meditation on the nature of pop, as their band name is, I’m not entirely sure if you’d be satisfied. Granted, I’ve only heard two of their songs (including this one—check out “X, Y, & Zee” for more), and neither of them concern their lyrics with such things. What they’ve got is something far superior: four and a half minutes of listing off comics, movies, TV shows, and bands that they like—sorry, dig. And it’s a blast. Aside from the fact that I never anticipated Alan Moore ever being directly referenced in a song, it’s just a catchy, synthy, fandom-fest—I’m surprised that this hasn’t been accepted as some kind of comic con anthem. Plus, there’s the enhancement of the music video, in all of its terrible ’80s CGI glory—lots of old TV sets floating around in the ether and the band members superimposed over panels from Watchmen and The Killing Joke. It’s the nerdiest club banger I’ve ever heard. What else is there to say? It slaps. Glad we can formally acknowledge that Alan Moore knows the score.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
…well, pretty much anything that they mention in this song: The song is basically a reading list in and of itself, so…
And that’s another Bowie album for the books! As…incapacitated as he was during that period, Young Americans feels like the first album of proof of how easily it came to Bowie to slither in and out of genres as easily as most people stroll through an open door. It oozes with slickness—somewhere in my mental periphery, this album exists solely in a smoky nightclub as midnight ticks by, clammy with warmth and blasting with saxophones. Personally, sometimes the sax went on a little too long for my liking (see “Win”), but for the most part, Bowie knew exactly how much to smear about—and make it sound deliciously raw and sultry.
But sultry isn’t all that the album boasts—Bowie always has something clever and meditative up his sleeve. Fresh off of Diamond Dogs, which was full of the proposed contents for a musical version of George Orwell’s 1984 which he never got to make, Bowie had Big Brother on the brain; the kind of theatricality that what I’ve listened to of Diamond Dogs suits a musical well, but as he turned his genre gaze to soul, it almost feels like he had that sultry quality in mind and turned it into deliberate deception. The subject of “Somebody Up There Likes Me” is the sleaziest of the sleazy—a politician who seems to float amongst his subjects without any fear of retribution: “He’s everybody’s token, on everybody’s wall/Blessing all the papers, thanking one and all/Hugging all the babies, kissing all the ladies/Knowing all that you think about from writing on the wall.” As the saxophone howls, Bowie’s fictional figure struts through the street, stopping once in a while to sweep a woman up into his arms and plant a kiss on her cheek. But every act of generosity is an empty one—this is someone grooming the public along with his own image, putting on a show of authenticity just to get them to cough up the spare change from their pockets. Bowie sums it up in the bridge: “Was a way when we were young, that/Any man was judged by what he’d done, but/Now you’ve pick them on the screen (What they look like).” Fresh off the heels of Nixon, I’m sure this was already closer to the political climate than most people wanted to admit, but I can’t help but think of how this has only been exacerbated—and not just in the 21st century. We got Reagan only a handful of years after Young Americans was released (there’s a “savage son of the TV tube” for you), and the cycle has only repeated itself in the years since. But for me, the genius in this song isn’t necessarily about the message, timely as it continues to be; this song could have been put in any of his albums, but having it on Young Americans makes the sleaze glow like neon. Setting this politician against the backdrop of a distinctly American sound, something that comes off so howling and genuine, encapsulates that political climate disturbingly well—a façade of a clean-cut, American man of the people with charm and sex appeal, but with all manner of evils stowed just out of reach of the cameras. The soundscape of Young Americans begs for some kind of old Hollywood love story, and Bowie knew it—and he took that atmosphere to its most perverse extreme just to make it ring true.
I enjoyed Hafsah Faizal’s Sands of Arawiya duology when it came out, but when I heard that she was doing a fantasy heist novel with vampires and tea involved…yep. I’m in. No questions asked. And like her previous books, A Tempest of Tea was full of heart, humor, and more than a little blood.
Arthie Casimir runs a tight ship. By day, she runs a tearoom, but as soon as night falls, it’s a hub for vampires. It’s her only livelihood, and the one thing keeping her off the streets. But her secret is slowly spilling out—and the only way to keep it under wraps—and running in the first place—is to make a deal with some of the most dangerous vampires in the city. And infiltrating their inner circles isn’t a job for just one person. With a ragtag crew at her back, Arthie finally has an in—but will they be able to get out in one piece?
TW/CW: loss of loved ones (past), blood, gore, violence, themes of colonialism, racism, human trafficking/kidnapping (past), fire
Everybody, say it with me: every YA fantasy novel with an ensemble cast and a heist plot isn’t ripping off Six of Crows! Every YA fantasy novel with an ensemble cast and a heist plot isn’t ripping off Six of Crows!
Sure, the inspiration is there (it’s hard not to be inspired by Leigh Bardugo, after all), but like The Gilded Wolves or Into the Crooked Place, the similarities end with a fantasy heist plot with multiple POVs. (The same cannot be said for Among Thieves. BOOOOOO.) I already had high hopes that Hafsah Faizal had the skill to pull off a fantasy heist of her own, and she more than delivered—A Tempest of Tea was nothing short of a delight from start to finish.
Hafsah Faizal has a knack for creating lovable characters, the kind that easily bounce off one another and produce no shortage of genuinely clever banter. I’m glad to say that this quality carried over tenfold into A Tempest of Tea! Arthie was such a compelling protagonist to follow; her wit and determination made her the perfect mastermind for the Athereum heist, and her charm made every line of dialogue a treat. Her relationship with the equally charming Jin made for a pair with instant chemistry—they were similar enough that they meshed with each other excellently, but different enough to make them unique assets to the team that they were building. Flick, though the least developed of the three, was just as compelling—I find myself wanting so much more of her backstory! I imagine we’ll get more of that in book 2, but having that part of her somewhat hidden gave her so much more appeal, especially given that she was instrumental to the heist.
The setting was equally lovable in all of its lush descriptions! Already, it’s just pure fun to begin with—a historical, London-like setting with vampires embedded in the culture—what’s not to like? There’s really not a whole lot of magic, but just by introducing vampires and having them affect Arthie’s world in the ways that they did made A Tempest of Tea so much fun to pick apart. A lot of those shifts were evident in the changes Arthie made to her teahouse (and bloodhouse) when night fell—subtle hints like those made the world feel so much more real—and under a very palpable strain. The vampires themselves weren’t the most original take on vampires I’ve ever seen (not really much to distinguish them from any other vampire), but Faizal’s way of writing them is what made them stand out—they were often alluring, but in a way where the predatory side of them was transparent, but their influence of the characters was as well.
Part of why I was so excited for Faizal to do a heist novel was that her style seems like it was made for that all along. She has such a cinematic, action-packed writing style that made the Sands of Arawiya books such an adventure. It seems like more years of writing experience under her belt have benefitted her greatly—all that time honing her writing made A Tempest of Tea a finely crafted heist novel! All of the beats were there, and though they were familiar, Faizal’s writing practically jumps off the page, making the atmosphere seep through the ink and drag you right along with Arthie and her band of outcasts and criminals. There’s tons of well-choreographed action, but just the right amount that it didn’t overwhelm the narrative. Up until the ending (more on that later), the pacing was similarly excellent—the balance of character development/backstory, worldbuilding, and delicately constructing the plot made for a book that I had to force myself to not read in one sitting.
However, my only major issue—and the only thing keeping me from giving it the full four stars—is how the culmination of the heist was executed. We got all of the tension of sneaking into the Athereum and some of the confrontation, but the execution of it felt incredibly rushed. I could almost stretch my suspense of disbelief enough to side with Faizal and say that it was supposed to feel like a blur, but that’s reaching, even for me. There were far too many twists and turns crammed into a single scene, and for all of the somewhat quiet scenes that went on earlier in the novel, I could have used some more page space to spread all of these events out. It was discombobulating, but not in a way that felt stylistic or intentional in any way. It also dampened the emotional impact of the ending—we’d been going so fast that I barely registered that the book had actually ended when it did.
All in all, an action-packed heist fantasy that faltered in some execution at the end, but flourished in its cinematic writing and characters. 3.75 stars, rounded up to 4!
A Tempest of Tea is the first book in the Blood and Tea duology, with an untitled sequel tentatively slated for release in 2025. Hafsah Faizal is also the author of the Sands of Arawiya duology (We Hunt the Flame and We Free the Stars), and has contributed short stories to the anthologies Eternally Yours and The Grimoire of Grave Fates.
Today’s song:
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
Affirmation of the week: I have listened to this song a healthy amount of times. At least I didn’t pull the “listen but nothing but this song for almost four hours straight” stunt that I did with “Broken Man.” See? I’m better now. I’m savoring this one, and by “savoring,” I mean “listening to it slightly less, but still putting it on repeat for at least half an hour when it comes on shuffle.” What new St. Vincent does to an mf.
“Broken Man” is shining proof that All Born Screaming has a good chance of being my album of the year, but somehow, Annie Clark outdid herself even more with this latest single. I’m glad that “Broken Man” and “Flea” are tracks three and four on the album, respectively; even past the fact that they fit so slickly together, I like the idea that the title and closing tracks are a secret—she’s got something insane up her sleeve. I can just tell. After “Broken Man”‘s torrent of fury, vengeance, and Dave Grohl’s drumming, “Flea” makes the transition into the outright bloody—not bloody in the sense of the trail of destruction that “Broken Man” left, but in the sense of parasitism. Clark described the upcoming All Born Screaming as being bred in “That kind of isolation [that] breeds paranoia and loneliness…loneliness can breed violence.” Now I can see exactly where the whole “post-plague pop” label she stuck on it comes from. “Flea” slinks along on tiny, pointed legs, thrumming with a racing heartbeat and an insatiable thirst for blood; the repetition of “Once I’m in, you can’t get rid of me” is sung lower and raspier, a threat paired with a predatory lick of the lips. The kind of loneliness and violence Clark described seems to be exactly where this kind of sinister lust comes from—being isolated for so long could easily make love turn to lust, and lust consequently to hunger, so drained of human touch that what was once affection has become leeching for nutrients at the other person’s expense. And everything about “Flea” sounds frighteningly hungry, down to the parched-throat rasp with which Clark delivers the verses. When she ends verse two with a dried-out confession of “I look at you, and all I see is meat,” followed by a faint belch in the background, I suddenly got the feeling that I was being watched by something waiting to tear me limb from limb and suck me dry. It’s intense, but it’s the kind of intoxicating thrill ride that I’ve taken with Clark for nearly ten years. And the chorus finds the narrator covered in someone else’s blood, begging for just one more bite; the desperation sloughs off like a second skin, every blood-soaked belt starved and howling. It’s a kind of visceral musicianship that I haven’t seen from St. Vincent in years; although Daddy’s Home was certainly raw, it was the kind of raw you get from getting someone enough wine to spill about their childhood trauma and laugh it off. All Born Screaming is about as raw as flesh itself—it’s all the clearer that Clark has no intention of pulling punches, and that’s exactly what makes a St. Vincent song so iconic. “Rattlesnake” and “Severed Crossed Fingers” don’t illicit waves of emotion in me for nothing—they’re hearts laid bare in the street. In other words: Clark is at her best when she’s herself. Should be a given, but it’s more evident in some albums than others.
Aaaaaaaaaand, that’s one more album on the Sisyphean Album Bucket List. Between the “Wolf Like Me” (the best song there is about werewolves after this), the deeply moving “Province” with its David Bowie feature (YOU HEARD ME!!), and this, I now know that Return to Cookie Mountain has to make its way into the rotation. I have Chelsea Wolfe to thank for this one; at her fantastic show at the Gothic Theater in March, she played this before the show—I wouldn’t be surprised if she was a fan before, but I suspect that it’s a kind of thank you to the fantastic Dave Sitek, who produced her truly fantastic new album, She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She. Also, with a title like Return to Cookie Mountain, I feel like I just have to listen.
What “Tonight” made me realize about TV on the Radio is how effectively—and quickly—they can craft an atmosphere. Some of the most layered ones I can think of are from their early career, namely the first version of “Staring at the Sun” that appeared on their debut EP, Young Liars. Instead of the shorter version that made the cut for Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes, this one has a thirty second intro (that feels longer, honestly) that consists of just the a cappella vocals of the band, interspersed with an excerpt from a Spanish-speaking radio station. Even though the chatter on the radio station seems cheerful and singsong, the drawn-out gives it a prolonged air of foreboding and sorrow to come, like the next thing we hear will be the somber announcement of someone’s death. Thankfully, that doesn’t happen, but the first lyrics we hear on the heels of that are “Cross the street from your storefront cemetery,” which, bam. That’s how you start a song. When it comes to both of those aspects, “Tonight” operates in a similar way, creating an atmosphere that’s haunting before the instruments even kick in. With the whine of a distant siren and the ever-so-slightly distorted collision of wind chimes, “Tonight” instantly transports you to a place of brown grass and barren vastness, pockmarked by dead trees strung with glass bottles and the faint sounds of the road in the distance. The music seems to lumber with every step, a beleaguered creature that lurches with every step, as if its limbs are tied down with the wind chimes you hear tinkling throughout the song. Hollow whistles harmonize with a moaning clarinet and Tunde Adebimpe’s clarion call of a voice, all at once ragged and brimming with vitality. A fair amount of the buzz surrounding TV on the Radio when they got their start were vocals comparisons of his to Peter Gabriel, and it’s an apt one—they have a similar quality of being roughly visceral, but booming with emotion. Dave Sitek is also credited with “magic” on this song, which I cannot find a musical definition for the life of me, but if there’s anything that you would credit the man for, it’s that. He has the touch.
I often get so caught up in the atmosphere that I only mine the lyrics later, but the lyrics in “Tonight” pop out so prominently on the first listen; as the wind chimes huddle for warmth, Tunde Adebimpe’s voice cuts through them like a steak knife through fabric—”My mind is like an orchard/Clustered in frozen portraits.” How does this man do it? Every single line in this song is a literary gem in and of itself, and it’s not just because of the repeated references to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Telltale Heart”—like heartbeats rumbling through flimsy floorboards, the lyrics never fail to send chills up my spine: “Her rusty heart starts to whine/In its tell tale time.” My rusty heart sure does whine whenever those lyrics wash over me. And like the sparse nature of the atmosphere, the lyrics tell of a spare mental space, one so full of sorrow and unpleasant memories that, like the telltale heart, cannot be pushed from the mind. The song still haunts me in a largely melancholy way, but it has an uplifting sentiment at its heart. I can’t help but think of Soundgarden’s “The Day I Tried to Live” and its similar atmosphere of doom, but its lyrical heart being the fact that despite all of the horrible things crashing down around you, there will always be something left to live for, so all you can do is push through. Adebimpe’s sentiment feels like wading through a slurry of unpleasantness that never seems to end (“Blossoms that bloom so fine, just to drop from the vine/I’ve seen them all tonight), but he makes the light at the end of the tunnel shine as bright as it can: “The time that you’ve been afforded/May go unsolved, unrewarded/Some nameless you cannot know, may be coming to show you/Unbridled love and light.” No matter how much you have to push down and wade through, never doubt that good things are coming. It’s something I struggle to hold to heart, but I’ve added this song as an unexpected guiding light. I can never know the future. It scares me. But there is certainty in the love lingering beyond my current time. There is always love.
Contrary to my graphic, this is not, in fact, that well-intentioned but ultimately regrettable black square everybody posted back in 2020. My text box accidentally cut out the 2 on Black Metal 2, the only thing distinguishing it from the cover of Black Metal, which is…also just a black square. Gotta admire Dean Blunt for committing to the bit.
I stumbled across this song thanks to Arlo Parks, who chose Black Metal 2 as one of her picks on her episode of Amoeba Records’ series What’s In My Bag?, where she also talks about my bloody valentine and happens to be wearing one of the coolest Radiohead shirts I’ve ever seen. The songs she discusses there—“VIGIL” and “the rot”—serve as bookends, the opener and closer of Black Metal 2, respectively. Both of them have the atmosphere of a massive curtain thrown over your eyes—you’re immediately thrown somewhere else in a space that Blunt has created; no time is wasted in transporting you into his world. While “VIGIL” has the tidal-wave mounting tension of strings to prop it up, “the rot” is the last, gentle minutes of a plane ride home. It’s a distinctly sunset song: you’re slumped back in your seat, golden light is spilling through the window, and you have the sense, more than ever, that a chapter is closing, but not necessarily in a negative way. You can tell that there’s a myriad of different instruments, but all of them are toned down to a faint crawl, strings gently winding, acoustic guitars drifting away like insects in the early evening. “the rot” in particular has such a gorgeous vocal contrast between Blunt and guest artist Joanne Robertson; like Phoebe Bridgers and Jeroen Vrijhoef on “Garden Song,” what grounds the song is the stark difference, although that of Blunt and Robertson feels much more natural and less jarring than the latter. Where Blunt has the warmth and thickness of the ocean lapping over a volcanic shore, Robertson’s words float like the breeze stirring the water. Both of them drift like motes of dust into the air, closing out Black Metal 2. Without even having listened to the whole album, I can tell how successful “the rot” is as a gentle closer.
Ugh, I’m so glad this song came back intro my regular rotation recently. The outro did wonders for amping me up for my astronomy midterm.
It’s been about four years since I’ve consciously started listening to this song, but I’m sure my dad played it in the car long before that. But I’ll always love this era of Lou Reed, and you know who I’ll also always love? David Bowie. And Bowie, along with Mick Ronson (Bowie’s guitarist in the Spiders from Mars) co-produced Transformer, which has spent a woefully long time on my album bucket list. It’s smack dab in that early-’70s sound that I just live for, and I’ve already heard a handful of the classics from the album already—“Walk On the Wild Side” and “Perfect Day,” to name a few. But “Satellite of Love” remains my favorite thus far, and it’s not just because I collect space-related songs like a bower bird collects shiny rocks and trinkets. As with…well, almost every Lou Reed song, “Satellite of Love” is tinged with melancholy; it tells of love watched from a distance, the aftermath of a breakup watched from below like a stargazer looking at a meteor shower. The offbeat admission of “I love to watch things on TV” feels like an admission of what Reed thought that the relationship had turned into—just something to pass the time and make the eyes go limp. I can’t help but think of Lisa Hannigan—I can’t be sure if this was her exact inspiration, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the chorus of “Passenger” came from a similar metaphor of distant love adrift in the sky—”Oh, my satellite/Oh, my passenger.” For once, Lou Reed is the one that doesn’t sound abjectly in mourning—wistful, sure, but there’s still some light shining in the corner of his eyes, even if it’s just the reflection of a star. For me, the outro is what pumps just the barest pulse of hope into “Satellite of Love”—the piano begins to gallop, clapping and snapping dominates the percussion, and Reed begins a harmony with a wailing, angel-voiced Bowie. Reed remains anchored to the ground, but Bowie, naturally, ascends skyward with every note. There’s something about it that feels like he’s extending a hand from somewhere in the night sky, inviting us to join in the chorus.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries, #1) – Martha Wells – the detached observation of love (and humanity in general) is much more humorous than wistful in nature here, but we can’t deny that Murderbot likes to watch things on TV.
Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.
That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
Ever since it came out, Drunk on All Your Strange New Words has been on my radar; beforehand, I hadn’t even heard of Eddie Robson, but the premise was so fascinating that I just had to get my hands on it. After several trips to several bookstores with no luck in finding it, my hold finally came on Kindle—and it was a delight to read!
For Lydia, First Contact started in the mind. The aliens we greeted were called the Logi, and they communicated entirely telepathically. Lydia works as a translator for a Logi cultural attaché named Fitz. It’s a pleasant job—Fitz is good-natured, and together, they pick apart plays and literature to determine if they are suited for intergalactic sales to the Logi. The unfortunate side effect is that translating the Logi’s telepathic language into English makes her feel drunk, earning her a less-than-stellar reputation on the job. But when Fitz is murdered and all eyes land on her as the suspect, Lydia must keep the police and Logi ambassadors off of her tail—and get to the bottom of Fitz’s murder.
TW/CW: xenophobia (fictional), murder/assassination, mild violence, death threats
I am on my hands and knees trying to find sci-fi with aliens that really feel alien. The quest is ongoing. But if you’re on that same quest with me (let us join hands, sisters in disappointed with humanoid aliens), Drunk on All Your Strange New Worlds is the cure for all that ails—all that and a dose of some good ol’ British humor.
I get to go off about aliens!! I GET TO GO OFF ABOUT ALIENS!! ALIENS WOOOOOOOOOOO THIS IS WHAT I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR
First off: the Logi! Drunk on All Your Strange New Words boasts some incredible alien design and culture, and I had so much fun exploring it throughout the novel. The whole concept of telepathic aliens whose speech makes the act of translation make humans feel drunk was already fascinating to me; it was so out of left field, and a concept I’d never really considered before; the only other instance I’ve seen of alien speech having unintended physical effects on the human body or brain was in A Desolation Called Peace (though that was arguably more drastic), but it still felt truly weird, which a lot of sci-fi doesn’t touch on, strangely. I loved getting such a complex, multilayered picture of the Logi beyond that, from the head coverings they wear to protect from Earth’s atmosphere to their unexpected strength; some of the elements of them almost veered into the supernatural (technically not much of a spoiler since it happens early on, but the reveal was so cool to me that I’ll keep my mouth shut for your enjoyment), but even that felt like a marker of an alien well done—so outlandish that the only explanation that humans can come up with is paranormal.
Creating all of that excellent background for the Logi is one thing, but it wasn’t all left as a lofty concept to puff up the worldbuilding—it had real, tangible effects on the characters and the plot, which I was so grateful for. Robson executed the real-time effects of humans interacting with a lot of these alien behaviors exceedingly well! It isn’t just that Lydia feels like she’s had a few too many after a long translation job—the feeling of drunkenness extends to drunken behaviors, the consequences of which had unfortunate implications for keeping said job. Having that was also a great device to start putting Lydia under suspicion for the other characters—there were enough instances of perceived instability or unprofessional attitudes that the authorities had all the more evidence to implicate her in Fitz’s murder. This is all to say that Robson really left no stone unturned when it came to the worldbuilding, and my enjoyment skyrocketed because of that!
The cultural environment around First Contact and the integration of the Logi into human culture also felt a little too real, in the best and worst way possible. At this point, the world has advanced into an undefined point in the future, and enough time has passed between now and First Contact that there aren’t just bigots and zealots with xenophobic intention, but organizations targeting aliens and professors giving whole lectures on what they perceive as a Logi encroachment into human culture, literature, and media. Paired with the faulty software that scores the truthfulness of the news that Lydia consumes (that aspect felt very “three days from now”), it felt like a more realistic depiction of alien contact and communication than we usually get; at heart, we still fear what we don’t understand, but it’s neither all-out annihilation of the aliens nor a global, complete hippie kumbaya event of unity. It’s demonstrative of human nature in the face of what we don’t understand: the bad and the very ugly, but enough good to keep us afloat and on good terms with the visitors from another world.
For most of the novel, I was really into the mystery surrounding Fitz’s murder. (I knew it was gonna happen from the start, since, y’know, in the blurb, but I didn’t want for him to die. I just wanna see the little alien guys!! Let them vibe!!) The slow burn of it kept me turning page after page, and for most of the novel, felt appropriately paced. It didn’t feel like we were jumping from place to place for no reason—every outing had a motive and revelation that added to the mystery in a way that made sense. However, though I enjoyed much of it, I feel like it got a little too slow-burn. The subtlety was good for most of the novel, but it got to a point where I was 90% of the way through the book and we still had no idea who the killer was and who the prime suspect was, now that most of the others had been eliminated by that point. Said killer was also introduced very late into the novel and quite sparingly, which made the reveal feel unearned—if we’ve spent all this time poring through suspects and barely touched on the actual killer, then what was the point? For such a clever novel, that felt like such an amateurish move—the only reason that we didn’t suspect them was because we had no idea who they even were for almost the entire novel.
All in all, a delightful combination of sci-fi and murder mystery that boasted some of my favorite aliens that I’ve read in a while. 4 stars!
Drunk on All Your Strange New Words is a standalone, but Eddie Robson is also the author of Hearts of Oak.
Today’s song:
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
Happy Sunday, bibliophiles, Happy Trans Day of Visibility, and Happy Easter for those celebrating!
Mentally, I’m still at the beginning of the semester, but somehow midterms are over and I’ve just gotten back from break…ignoring that…
Let’s begin, shall we?
GENERAL THOUGHTS:
I’ve continued to be busy in most of my academic aspects of life, but I’ve managed to stay on top of it—midterms season wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be, and it certainly helped that we got an accidental four-day weekend thanks to a snowstorm so drastic that my college called two snow days in a row. I’ve lived in Colorado my whole life, and I’ve never experienced a double snow day…good times, gotta say. I didn’t leave my dorm for all of that Thursday and spent my time playing Minecraft and drinking hot chocolate. A win is a win. But now, the weather’s warming up, and I’m looking forward to soaking it all in.
I honestly thought that this month was going to be my worst reading month, but I read a lot more than I expected; spring break definitely gave me a boost, and March has ended up being my best reading month of 2024 so far! Rating-wise, it’s a different story (certainly more stinkers in this batch), but there were plenty of excellent reads before and after my brief reading slump. Blogging has been about the same—again, school has made it so that I’m mostly sticking to my usual book reviews and Sunday Songs, but I’ve had fun writing them all the same.
Other than that, I’ve just been drawing, playing Minecraft (WE’RE FINALLY GETTING THE DOG UPDATE), studying, watching The Bear, The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin (STAND AND DELIVAH), Abbott Elementary, and Constellation (I haven’t been this stressed out and baffled by a show since Dark, and that’s really saying something), series 17 of Taskmaster, Dune: Part 2 (may thy knife chip and shatter), seeing Chelsea Wolfe live (!!!!! THE QUEEN), and reverting from human to hibernating grizzly bear the minute snow started falling.
READING AND BLOGGING:
I read 19 books this month! I thought it would end up being a lot less than that, but spring break gave me much more time to read. As far as ratings, this has probably been my worst reading month (first DNF and 1-star rating of the year…), but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t read a ton of fantastic books!
Happy Sunday, bibliophiles, Happy Trans Day of Visibility, and Happy Easter, for those celebrating! I hope this week has treated you well. 🐰🏳️⚧️
For once, I’ve got a color scheme that lines up with the festive colors. Enjoy it while it lasts….either way, this week: songs about love, songs that feel like being in a swimming pool, and songs about jelly.
It’s been about a year since De La Soul’s music triumphantly returned to streaming after decades of legal battles, and about a year since my De La Soul awakening. Three Feet High and Rising is now permanently etched into my map of my freshman year of college; I spent a good two weeks with that delightfully creative and unabashedly silly album as my soundtrack, and it put a spring in my step even when the weather remained cold enough for those nasty piles of sludge and dirt leftover from at least three separate snowstorms to stay on the sidewalk. I listened to it in spring, but it’s undeniably a summer album, all bright colors and jumping joy.
Three Feet celebrated its 35-year anniversary earlier this month (3/3), and with it came a handful of demos that got left off of the extensive; it feels like a Kate Bush or self-titled St. Vincent situation (and no, I will not stop shoehorning the latter album into every conversation, this is just how it is talking to me) where they were just cooking so much and without any dilution of talent, so they just had to leave a few tracks on the back burner so as not to a) overstuff the album and b) blow our minds more than they already had. I haven’t had the chance to dig through the other demos and scrapped songs that they released, but it’s clear from “Freedom of Speak (We Got Three Minutes)” that it was a tough decision to leave them off Three FeetHigh and Rising. Never once was their joyous spirit dimmed, and this track is proof. After a conversation with my family, I concluded that part of what endeared me to De La Soul (and a lot of other hip-hop artists at the time) is that they lacked the machismo that defined the genre in the decades to come; not to get all “mOdERn mUSiC sUCks” with it, but I do find myself missing the early days when people like them or A Tribe Called Quest just released their collage hip-hop with subject matters that, most often, just ended up as anecdotes about their days and the snacks that they liked—or, in De La Soul’s case, a PSA about wearing deodorant that clocks in at less than a minute long. (“THAT’S RIGHT! YOU SMELL 🫵”) Who knows why that mentality got left in the dust; I bet it hasn’t gone away entirely, but I’m not well versed in hip-hop enough to know where it ended up. “Freedom of Speak” has a similarly stream-of-consciousness premise, with a good chunk of it being Posdnuos and Trugoy (rest easy) talking about their routines—taking a shower, cooking breakfast, shopping with girlfriends. But even with such a mundane subject matter, they managed to inject it with the same infectious joy that made the whole of Three Feet High and Risin so memorable—ordinary things feel like the smoothest, most cheerful events to grace the earth, and all of it is wrapped around a fake construct: being forced to cram all of their musings into three minutes. They got cut off at 2:51, unfortunately. Oops.
Lucy Dacus brought me here; while I was doing some digging on “My Mother & I” a few weeks ago, I found a thread talking about the performance with her mom on backing vocals, and a user mentioned seeing her with Deau Eyes as the opener on at least one of her tours. They both hail from Virginia and seem to be on good terms with each other, and any friend of Lucy Dacus (minus T*ylor Sw*ft) is a friend of mine, so I figured I would give her a listen. And…I can’t get fully on board with most of her style— it ranges from somewhat experimental indie to pure twang, but most of it comes off quite forced. And the fact that a lot of the marketing around her weirdly centers around her being a gemini, of all things (?), is certainly odd, but…if that’s her worst sin, then I can let it pass. That one’s probably more on her marketing team than on her.
“When,” against some of the other Deau Eyes songs I listened to, sounds more like 2020’s Sleater-Kinney, which is a win I’ll certainly take. Even if my enjoyment of Deau Eyes extends mostly to this song, it’s a smoothly urgent indie shuffle, rattling along with Ali Thibodeau’s (ohhhhhhh, so that’s where the name came from) vocals, which hold the melody steadier than an anchor holds down a time-battered ship in the stormy sea. Delayed guitar riffs travel in neat circles around the centerpiece of Thibodeau’s voice, playing tricks on my ears as I try to pinpoint exactly where they’re coming from—a single center or hovering all around? It’s almost dizzying on headphones, but Thibodeau keeps it reserved enough to not overwhelm the song. In this case, it’s the lyrics that are the spotlight; in a world where we are told that we are naught but products to be sold, when our bodily wellness is the cost for being able to navigate through the world with any kind of arbitrary success, Thibodeau has a bridge that couldn’t be any more relevant: “Hey, I see you/You matter more than you think you do/Each and every move, it matters too/So set the mood.” Just like how Thibodeau’s vocals anchor the music, she anchors the space around her, encouraging us to follow suit; the lyrics are simple, but undeniably true. Maybe I’m not sold on every part of Deau Eyes’ catalogue, but good on her for spreading the good word of letting yourself take up space in a world that wants to make us small. It’s what you deserve.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
VenCo – Cherie Dimaline – the time has come to reclaim your space, and by “reclaim your space” I mean “exact feminist witchcraft justice upon the skeevy, corrupt white men who wanted to take that away.”
Sometimes, you have a long and sentimental reason for finding and subsequently liking a song. Sometimes Apple Music digs it up, slaps it on the abject depression “Chill” playlist, and you listen to it just because of the name. It’s like “Crocodile Tears and the Velvet Cosh”—if there is ever another song called “Jelly Filled Coffin,” they’ll be copying this guy.
I first talked about Hether (a.k.a. Paul Castelluzzo) a little over a year ago, and I didn’t expect to be talking about him again—”Shy” was sweetly catchy, but I didn’t find myself wanting to uncover more of his music. I guess I’m a lazy, no-good, Gen Z slave to That Damn Phone then, since Apple Music did the discovering for me, but…for once, the algorithm did something good, unlike the time that of Montreal’s nearly 10-minute-long suicidal ideation “No Conclusion” landed on, of all places, the “Get Up!” playlist. I can’t make this shit up. At least we can take comfort in the fact that no human mind could fuck a playlist up that badly. You have to take the wins when they aren’t blatantly the product of automation. Even though Play it Pretty was released only three years after Hether Who? – EP, there seems to have been a shift towards the meandering for Hether; “Jelly Filled Coffin” has the glassy eyes of the peak of summer, humid and delirious from staring too long in the sun. The first comparison that came to mind was a less psychedelic Ty Segall—they have a similar delivery, drifting like a lazy river in the public pool, but just as brightly chlorine-colored. Every line feels like it’s being dictated from somewhere in the depths of the same pool, rippling and unnaturally blue (or is that the jelly? Depends on the jelly we’re talking about). The concept of a jelly-filled coffin was such an oddball pairing that I almost didn’t think of how oddly tragic it could potentially be—presumably being lowered six feet under, but trapped in a substance slippery enough to give you the illusion of movement. That would explain the resignation with which most of the lyrics are delivered: “Rip it out from my chest/Keep the love and leave the rest/Tether me to a post/A parasite chose you, the host.” And yet, even with the exhaustion creeping through the ripples of distortion, it never feels truly sad—it’s more delirium than outright depression, sleepwalking on the borders between sadness and just being tired. My dad made the comparison of his lyrics to Robyn Hitchcock, and many of his songs have a similar quality; on anybody else, it might sound tragic, but here, it could just be as deep as words strung together that sounded unique.
Like Hether, I never expected to be wandering back around to Alice Phoebe Lou. I think it was around two years ago that I found her through “Witches,” which came from an old high school friend after I posted one of those “send me a song that reminds me of you” question boxes on my Instagram story. I was glad to have a new song to spin around in my head, and I was gladder still that something as gently bubbly as “Witches” reminded them of me. It sneaks back into my shuffle every now and then, and I never complain when it does.
“Witches” and “Nostalgia” are only about a year apart in terms of release date, but both of them are broadly categorized under blues; the former doesn’t feel like blues at all—more sparkly indie pop than anything, but I have no purview to talk about how blues has evolved as a genre over the decades—but the latter certainly does. Fitting that this song is called “Nostalgia” in the first place, since all of it evokes a time capsule made of sea glass, harkening back to the slow, swaying melodies of the ’40s and ’50s, but with a distinctly modern touch. If there was one lyric that would properly encapsulate this song, it would be this: “It feels like swimming/Swimming with my eyes closed.” Indeed, the soft organs and Lou’s voice feel like they’re being projected from inside of an underwater cave, a rich gray until the light from a crack in the ceiling makes the water dance on the ripples in the rock. With every lyric, you travel further in the water in slow motion, the foam from your impact fanning out around you, bubbles swirling upwards as you close your eyes, letting the waves kiss your skin. And yet, it feels just as vividly like a ballroom slow dance, engulfed in golden light as the sunset fades into night and drinks clink all around you. Whichever effect Lou was going for—or neither of those at all—is suited to her voice; her voice dips from a quiet, bluesy coo to a musical exhale that echoes through the caverns with ethereal gentleness.
This is one of maybe…three or four Samia songs that I’ve listened to so far, and I wish I liked them all as much as I liked this one. Then again, there’s only a certain type of as-of-yet undiscovered musician that can cover The Magnetic Fields’ masterpiece “Born on a Train” (which I reviewed about a year ago!), and…I hate to say it, but Samia is not that kind of musician. But I’ll let it slide—Arcade Fire covered the same song ages ago, and they didn’t quite pull it off either; they have the extensive instrumentation to theoreticallypull it off, but the only recordings I could find were ones where the sound quality isn’t great and Win Butler was singing like he had the world’s most painful case of strep throat, so…not exactly their proudest moment either. It’s hard to cover near-perfection. I feel like Peter Gabriel has been one of the only people I can think of to cover The Magnetic Fields welland not make it sound either more melodramatic than it ever needed to be or just plain bland (seems there’s no in-between), but also, that’s Peter Gabriel. I should also mention The Shins and their excellent cover of “Strange Powers”—that, at least, was perfectly suited to James Mercer’s penchant for bare emotion, and even though The Magnetic Fields have such a dense orchestration to a lot of their songs, making this one acoustic wasn’t as risky of a move as it seems—Mercer makes it work beautifully. (Childhood staple, too.) We aren’t worthy of The Magnetic Fields, and we are similarly not worthy of Peter Gabriel or The Shins. It’s a hard act to follow. So props to her for trying, at least. Chances are I’m just too attached to “Born on a Train,” but I feel like to cover it, you’ve got to back up all that emotion with the toy-train-on-plastic-tracks instrumentals and faded grandeur peeking out from behind the curtain.
That aside, Samia captured something truly rare in “Charm You”—there’s something about it that sets it apart from all the other songs of hers I’ve listened to. Some of her other songs feel like she’s stretching her voice too thin, but the warm wails of this track perfectly suit the mood she’s meticulously crafted—a love song, but not one of wanting to chase a lover down or get them to like her. I’ve unintentionally bunched together too many songs that inherently feel like swimming, but this song in particular is a dive into a hot tub, a slow, boiling love that seeks to bare its soft parts: all of the pretense of a crush is gone, and all that’s left is to fall in deep: “What if we could shut up for an hour or two/Quiet, memorizing what the people do/Wouldn’t have to try and find myself in you.” The style of songwriting that Samia has taken is an approach I’ve seen a lot of indie pop artists take—collaging a hodgepodge of vignettes together to form a cohesive story—often a love story. It’s a move right out of the Phoebe Bridgers/Arlo Parks/Lucy Dacus/[fill in the blank with your sadgirl of choice] playbook, but what makes them stand out from the others is the emotion that strings them together—it’s not random moments just to flash your songwriting chops. That’s a trap I’ve seen a lot of songwriters fall into, but for once, Samia seems to have the writing flair to pull it off; every lyric on “Charm You” sounds like a red-cheeked confession with a bashful smile, giggling at some charmingly awkward memory: “Baby, let me show you the synthetic pond/Couldn’t we believe it was the hand of God/Making water boogie to a Ke$ha song?” Maybe it’s the way that the word “boogie” feels so out of place that it fits in perfectly or the image that it creates (I can see the warm, blue-lit water rippling from here, wherever there even is), but Samia’s vignettes are ones that stick, and not ones that just toss in a fruit metaphor and talk about smoking on the porch, or something. Like the album cover of Honey, there’s a blue warmth about “Charm You” that instantly charms the heart.
The Bookish Mutant 