Happy Sunday, bibliophiles, and happy New Year’s Eve!
2023 has been a year of growth for me; I’ve taken a lot of leaps that I never thought I would take, and all of them paid off. December has been busy, but now that I’m home for break, I’m glad that I’ll get some rest before the end of the year.
Let’s begin, shall we?
GENERAL THOUGHTS:
First off, I hit 600 followers a few days ago! Thank you all for sticking with me for all these years. Lots of love to you all.
Most of December was fairly stressful and chaotic, what with finals and all. The good thing about being an English major is that I typically don’t have any final finals that I have to take in class, but instead, I typically have to write rather long papers and slap some portfolios together. But now it’s all done! Now, I’m nearly done with my science credits, and I recently declared a minor in Women and Gender Studies, so I’m starting those classes next semester!
Blogging and reading are always slower around this time of year—the finals slump comes for us all. College (and getting older, I suppose) has slowed down my reading speed somewhat, but it makes me glad to spend more time with books on some days. (Doesn’t mean I still blow through books in a day sometimes. Happens to the best of us. The Siren, the Song, and the Spy was incredible.) It’s also been fun to introduce some book pairings to my Sunday Songs—I’m glad I can introduce a bookish aspect to them!
Other than that, I’ve just been getting work done pre- and post-finals, putting puzzles together, drawing when I can, celebrating the holidays with my wonderful family, and starting every week eagerly looking forward to Wednesday because of the new season of Fargo. (Dear LORD, what was that ending for episode 7?????? I’m SCARED)
READING AND BLOGGING:
I read 16 books this month! Inevitably slower going because of finals, but I’ve had a ton of great books towards the end of the month! I also passed my reading goal of 200 books—I read 207 books in 2023!
Whew, here we are on New Year’s Eve! What a year it’s been, huh? The fact that there’s 2/5ths depressing songs in this batch was entirely unintentional, but I’m of the firm opinion that the last one is a good way to close out 2023. Also—no, somehow the Phoebe Bridgers song this week isn’t one of the depressing ones, bizarrely. Who would’ve thunk.
This song, like a good song does, came back like an old, loyal dog when I needed it most. But before I get into it, I remembered that I reviewed Punisher when it came out. So let’s see what I thought about it back in 2020:
This was the first single to be released out of the whole album. When I first listened to it, something about it got under my skin, but as I’ve listened to it more, something about it has grown on me (no pun intended). A nostalgic, dreamlike opener to the album.(Rating: 7/10)
…huh. Well, I thought I’d have…more to work with there, but 2020 me wasn’t necessarily wrong. I’d certainly bump up the rating up to at least an 8 or an 8.5, though. It’s what this song deserves, upon a few more years of reflection. It’s a way-homer once you get past the age of 16.
Yes, there is some sad bastard music coming soon in this post (buckle up), but contrary to what…95% of Phoebe Bridgers’ discography would have you believe, this isn’t one of them. Pigeonholing an artist into being just a “sad girl” has a multitude of pitfalls, but one of them is that automatically assuming that slow = sad. In fact, I think this is one of her most hopeful songs. I remember taking a while to warm up to it at first—the startlingly low, Matt Berninger-esque backing vocals, probably several octaves below Bridgers, felt off at first. (In fact, the voice belongs to Jeroen Vrijhoef, her tour manager, who she described as sounding like “Dutch Matt Berninger.”) It’s a stark contrast—Vrijhoef’s rumbling bass almost becomes the unstable ground that Bridgers’ frayed-silk high notes treads over, but it grows on you after a while.
One thing that writing these posts this year has taught me is that I can see more clearly how I approach music; it’s always the music itself first, and unless something immediately jumps out at me (or if I come in expecting it), the lyrics follow on subsequent listens. That’s certainly what’s happened with this song. The dreamlike calmness has never failed to soothe me, but the lyrics have a soothing quality to them as well. The sleepily rambling second verse, where Phoebe Bridgers describes a meandering dream, has the murmur that you would only expect when she’s just woken up and is scrawling the non-sequitur fragments into her journal. (Not to project onto a complete stranger, but I feel like she’s the kind of person to keep a dream journal. I just get that vibe.) But even beyond that, “Garden Song” really is about growth. It’s the soft space where you can look back on your life, recognizing the good and bad, and see it as the soil for other things to grow. It’s the sad smile that you can see as you recall the painful times in your life, but also the comfort in realizing that your sprout has gone beyond that and bloomed, and the hope that there’s blooming yet to do. I find myself going back to 2020, a few months after Punisher came out, when it seemed like all of the lead-weight things pinning my shoulders down would never lift, and inevitably feeling heavy again, but remembering where I’m sitting now, and where my feet have taken me since then. The path was winding and full of twists, but it led us all here. As Bridgers herself said, “…if you’re someone who believes that good people are doing amazing things no matter how small, and that there’s beauty or whatever in the midst of all the darkness, you’re going to see that proof, too. And you’re going to ignore the dark shit, or see it and it doesn’t really affect your worldview. It’s about fighting back dark, evil murder thoughts and feeling like if I really want something, it happens, or it comes true in a totally weird, different way than I even expected.” There’s no denying the darkness, but it is never all there is.
“Garden Song” came back to me towards the end of finals, and of course, I had to sit a while in my spinny chair and sit with it. To me, it’s the perfect song to take with us to the new year—to reflect on how you’ve grown through everything, and that there is so much left to grow through. I’ll leave it with these lines:
“I don’t know how, but I’m taller It must be something in the water Everything’s growing in our garden You don’t have to know that it’s haunted The doctor put her hands over my liver She told me my resentment’s getting smaller No, I’m not afraid of hard work I get everything I want I have everything I wanted.”
Alright, here’s a blanket. This one’s from another sad girl, and it’s very much actually sad.
If there’s one thing that Adrianne Lenker can write well, it’s a heartbreak song. Unlike most of her solo work that I’ve listened to, there’s no acoustic guitar in sight. This time, Lenker has opted for something equally sparse and solemn: the classic solo piano ballad, aided by some faint, synthy notes in the background, apparently credited as “crystals.” It could’ve easily blended in with the acoustic-dominated landscape of most of her other music, but somehow, the slowly marching piano chords leave the song room to take every rattling breath. Thanks to the music video…I…yeah, I think I’ve now seen more of Adrianne Lenker than I ever needed to see, but this song provides more of that in the metaphorical sense, which I much prefer. She’s a soul-bearer. Something about the plaintive, ever-present waver in her voice seems to age her—it’s not like much time has passed between her solo work, but the shake in her voice seems to indicated that whatever inspired this song aged something inside of her, certainly. Poor thing. Whether or not this song will eventually be a part of an album or remain adrift in Lenker’s discography, it would make a wonderful, thematic addition to the end of an album—it wouldn’t even need to be the very last song, but it would fit in at least the final three or four. The opening lines lend themselves to an album fading into the ether, of both love and music slipping through your fingers—”I wish I’d waved when I saw you/I just watched you passing by.”
My musical wish for 2024: BRING BACK SLIDE WHISTLES, DAMMIT!
I’ve been riding off my dad’s high of Elephant 6 musicians after he recently watched the Elephant 6 Recording Co. documentary (hence the recent spike in Apples in Stereo-related content). There’s something so pure about so much of the music that they put out in the early days. Well…okay, maybe not on Neutral Milk Hotel’s part, but Robert Schneider (of the Apples) and Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss (of The Olivia Tremor Control) certainly knew how to juice playful simplicity out of synths and all manner of catchy melodies. The Apples in Stereo have a space-age, almost scientific quality to their pop songs, but to me, The Olivia Tremor Control has always come across as something just as whimsical, but in the way of flat colors and simple shapes that bounce around. I’ll die on the hill that this song deserves some kind of Chicka-Chicka Boom Boom-style music video to go along with it. The patchwork of goofy instruments scattered around (including the aforementioned, glorious slide whistle) gives it a delightful whimsy that calls to mind stacks of building blocks. Even the slight discomfort of the lyrics seem to be delivered with a wry smile—”Don’t I feel, don’t I feel like a mineral?/Don’t I feel, don’t I feel like a vegetable?” Maybe it’s the rhymes, or maybe just the fact that I’ve always found the phrase “animal, vegetable, or mineral” funny for no reason (I blame it on what little I remember from The Magician’s Nephew), but even vague alienation has a childlike whimsy to it in the hands of The Olivia Tremor Control. Probably the slide whistle, though.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The World of Edena – Mœbius – colored in with the same flat but vibrant colors that “I’m Not Feeling Human” is shaded in.
Okay, we’ve got one more peppy song before the depression hits…let’s ride the high while it lasts.
“Crash,” other than being a nostalgic, smiling thing popping up in my brain’s whack-a-mole system of remembering songs, feels like the better side of late ’80s pop. By then, the oversaturated synths and gated reverb had probably spread faster than the plague; I can’t speak from experience, given that…y’know, I wasn’t alive, but it had to have gotten obnoxious by that point. This song could have easily been that, but The Primitives seemed to know just the right balance to hit to make something instantly catchy, but that also managed to date itself in a way that wasn’t plasticky and corny. It’s distinctively ’80s without being distinctively ’80s, if you get what I mean. The guitars are bright, but not polished into oblivion, and yet there’s no denying the authentic, cartoon stars coming off of the opening riff. It’s practically begging to soundtrack a confident, reckless heroine with a slick jacket and and a pair of rollerblades, the kind with sparks that fly off with every turn she makes. Tracy Tracy, dolled up like some kind of new wave Marilyn Monroe in the music video, knows that she never needed to over-exaggerate her voice—the warmth of it, combined with the fiery embers self-contained in a tidy two and a half minutes, made for a song that’s unmistakable as a hit.
And they put this song in Dumb and Dumber? Huh?
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Little Thieves – Margaret Owen – Vanja Schmidt is certainly the kind of reckless firebrand that doesn’t know when to slow down—and it takes her to some unexpected places…
Another thing I have my wonderful dad to thank for: we watched a few episodes of Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth (it’s all on Youtube, go watch it), and besides the plentiful, earth-shattering truth bombs, for lack of a better phrase, about the nature of life and myth (and how those two aren’t really separate things after all), a quote from the second episode stood out to me when I was reminded of this song. At about 42:48, after he and Bill Moyers are discussing the manifestation of god in everything, and by extension, machines, Campbell examines the inner framework of a computer and remarks, “have you ever looked inside one of those things? You can’t believe it! It’s a whole hierarchy of angels…and those little tubes, those are miracles.” For the sake of not derailing this post so I can actually publish it on Sunday, I’ll holding back from expanding on all of the aforementioned Campbell capital-T Truth bombs, which he seems to produce with the same frequency as the other Campbell’s soup cans, but I can’t help but think of this song when I think of computers and angels. There’s no other word besides “angelic” to describe the distorted chorus of electric voices that begins at 2:15. That sound couldn’t have come from any other place save for the miraculous angel tubes. There’s some kind of gospel to this song, I swear.
Unless something absolutely drastic and apocalyptic happens, I doubt I’ll ever stop singing the praises of Radiohead. I’m long past caring about how inevitably insufferable I am as a result, but all the language I have about them ends up being hyperbolic. Kid A is probably somewhere amongst my favorite albums—I haven’t formally organized them past top 10, but I’d say that this lands somewhere in the 20s or 30s, at least. OK Computer, even if their chronological placement has doomed them to comparisons as long as there are music critics to do so, will always be the favorite child in my mind, but the special quality of this album can’t be understated. Like Punisher, another red, blue, and black-colored album that I listened to during the summer of 2020, it’s a signpost for a hyper-specific time in my life, and one of the most cohesive showcases of the talents of Thom Yorke and company. But as much as “Everything In Its Right Place” and “Idioteque” hold uncontested places in my heart, “Motion Picture Soundtrack” will wield the ultimate trophy as far as Kid A goes, and for my standards of music in general. Right now, it’s my favorite album closer of all time. (Before anybody says anything, I know, ackshually ☝️🤓 “Untitled” is technically the closer, but at this point, it’s basically a cooling-down extension to this song). As I brought up before, there’s an undeniable air of gospel about it—the synths that press in at the beginning sound like pipe organs run through a dystopian starscape, and if that’s the case, then the choir is certainly the angels dwelling just out of view in the pews.
“Motion Picture Soundtrack” was marinating in Thom Yorke’s massive cauldron of glorious music since the mid-nineties, where it was an acoustic lament befitting of The Bends. After that, it became a deeply solemn piano ballad somewhere in the depths of the OK Computer sessions, but I, for one, am glad that this is the definitive version, even if we were robbed of what was originally the third verse: “Beautiful angel/pulled apart at birth/Limbless and helpless/I can’t even recognize you.” (OW.) “Motion Picture Soundtrack” was always meant for cosmic grandeur; even though the opening mentions of “red wine and sleeping pills” ground us in the dim hours of planet Earth, the sprawling emotion of it all is the definition of all-consuming. It feels like the final leap off the cliff from death to rebirth, watching your feet slip and the gravel crumble beneath them as the electric, harp-like notes fill your ears like an endless field of stars. Within the infinite sprawl of sorrow, you can’t help but see the staggering beauty of life itself blossom in front of you. I’ll go out again and say it: I doubt we’ll ever come close to the tearjerking final line of Kid A: “I will see you in the next life,” and the pleading waver of Yorke’s soul-caressing voice makes it resonate all the more.
Kid A is probably the pinnacle of hopeless sad bastard music, but I can’t help but feel some kind of embryonic hope resting in the egg yolk of this song. “I will see you in the next life” is a release from all the mindless, sorrowful things that the rest of the verses lay out, and the promise of a starry new beginning. The closing of a chapter, the setting of a book back on the shelf, knowing that if you ever go back and read it, nothing will ever fully be the same, but knowing that isn’t always a bad thing.
What a way to end the year, huh? Just like “Garden Song,” I’m glad this song returned to me when it did. Radiohead is the gift that keeps on giving (me too many feelings to handle).
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Darkness Outside Us – Eliot Schrefer – this book takes “I will see you in the next life” very seriously. One of my favorite love stories of all time, and one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time as well.
Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.
That’s it for the last Sunday Songs of the year! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves.
I was going to publish this earlier in the day, but that was before my laptop charger broke. Luckily, I’ve got a spare, but I’m glad that it happened, because while I was rationing my laptop’s battery life, I finished a book that landed on this year’s honorable mentions! Happy accidents.
Growth happens every year, but 2023 has especially felt like a year of growth to me; I’ve gotten into the rhythm of college, and I’ve tread into more challenging territory with my English degree. I’ve had the honor of being a learning assistant, and the experience of helping teach a class has greatly enriched me—and given me a much-needed boost to my public speaking confidence. And I started the year with buzzing my hair off! Not something that past me thought I’d ever do. (For those of you who are uncertain: do it. It’s worth it. Growing out your hair takes a while, but it’s worth the experience.)
I still haven’t gotten into the reading rhythm that I used to have (and I doubt I ever will—Jeezus, how did I ever manage to read 300 books in a year? How?), but that doesn’t mean that I’ve found plenty of gems in the bunch. Like last year, I don’t have as many 5-star reads, but that’s fine with me—as I said last year, it’s probably a consequence of my tastes getting more selective, and finding them scattered few and far between makes me savor them that much more. It’s a strange bunch this year—fiction and nonfiction, time travel and pirates. But these are the books that made this year all the richer.
Let’s begin, shall we?
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️THE BOOKISH MUTANT’S 5-STAR READS OF 2023⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Ceremony – Leslie Marmon Silko | You thought I wouldn’t give a book with themes of mixed-race identity and storytelling 5 stars? Really?
A Thousand Steps into Night – Traci Chee | There’s something to be said about 5-star reads that come out of nowhere. So much more emotional than I bargained for, but that’s not a complaint.
TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK! Have you read any of these books, and if so, did you enjoy them as much as I did? What were your favorite reads of the year? Let me know in the comments!
Today’s song:
That’s it for my favorite books of the year! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles! Also, a belated Merry Christmas and a Happy Kwanzaa to those celebrating!
To my parents: I tried so hard not to finish this in one day. I tried. But it was just too good. Just like how I devoured The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea around two and a half years ago, its sequel, The Siren, the Song, and the Spy captured my heart, and added some intricate depth, timely commentary, and no shortage of emotion to Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s fantasy world. Also to my parents: thank you so much for the incredible Christmas present!
WARNING: this review may contain spoilers for The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea—tread lightly!
After the Pirate Supreme and their crew wounded the Emperor’s fleet, they have gone into hiding, growing the Resistance that they hope will end the colonial rule that has trapped them for decades. In the ruins of the battle, Genevieve, a loyal daughter of the empire, has washed up on the Red Shore. Now in the company of strangers, she must decide where her loyalties truly lie—and decide for herself if the empire has lied to her all along. Back on the mainland, Alfie is a spy in the Imperial Palace, hoping to tear it down from the inside. But when everyone is hiding false intentions, who can he trust in his quest to see the Resistance win?
Meanwhile, the Sea readies for battle, looking for vengeance after years of the Emperor robbing her of her daughters…
I would have been satisfiedif The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea was a standalone—it had an ambiguous, hopeful ending, and it’s rare to see novels that willingly keep their worlds in one book after an ending styled like that. Usually, when authors go and make said ambiguous but satisfying endings not so ambiguous by expanding the story and the world, it feels hollow—the sequel doesn’t always live up to the original, and sometimes, it just feels like a cash grab. The Siren, the Song, and the Spy is none of these things. It does what every sequel (and duology-closer) should do—it makes the already beloved characters, world, and plot all the more intricate and vast, but has no trouble sticking the landing and wrapping things up.
I think The Siren has the most POVs I’ve ever seen in a single book; some POVs only appear once or twice, but even still, I can think of at least ten (maybe more, I didn’t go back and count) that this novel cycles through over the course of just 320 pages. Usually, any number of POVs over five or six is too much for any author to handle; some characters don’t get developed the way they should, and some of them don’t need the page time or the internal dialogue that other characters need to make the story move forward. Normally, uneven emphasis on certain characters is also a flaw of multiple-POV novels. However, what Tokuda-Hall succeeded in was knowing when characters needed attention and when they didn’t; some chapters are dedicated to side characters, but they’re few and far between, and often shorter than the main character chapters. And somehow, by a stroke of luck, all of them felt necessary to the narrative—and all of them were compelling. Even minor antagonists got their time in the spotlight, but Tokuda-Hall used those moments to her advantage—sometimes, these chapters were more to reveal secrets than to peer inside characters’ heads. It’s a skill that very few authors have, but The Siren proved that Maggie Tokuda-Hall is incredibly adept at the art of the multiple-POV novel.
With Evelyn and Florian mostly out of the picture, The Siren develops many of the side characters present in The Mermaid—many of whom got necessary backstories, and often, something of a redemption arc. I didn’t expect to start rooting for Alfie after everything that he did in The Mermaid, but Tokuda-Hall did an excellent job of making him come to realize the error in his ways, and at least partially put him on the path to improvement. I don’t fully believe that he can ever be fully forgiven, and Tokuda-Hall acknowledges that, but what she’s also very skilled at is created complicated characters—”morally gray,” as much as it’s become a buzzword in both book communities and publishing these days, really is the best word for it. The difference is that Tokuda-Hall actually seems to know what the term really means. Introducing a batch of new characters (and not taking the easy route and killing a bunch of them off) was also a tricky task to surmount for Siren, but both the new characters and locations elevated the novel a ton; Koa and Kaia worked incredibly off of each other as siblings with wildly different personalities, and they meshed easily with some of the already established characters like Genevieve. And as with Mermaid, Siren is full of diversity—most of the new characters are people of color (as are most of the characters in the novel), and we also have Kaia, who has one hand, and a character who uses neopronouns.
Speaking of Genevieve…
I was already excited to see what Genevieve would do next after how Mermaid left off, but that was mostly because of how cunning of a character she was. At first, it didn’t seem necessary to me for her to have a redemption arc—she could have been such a sneaky minor villain, and I would’ve enjoyed seeing that develop. But her character arc was so much more than redemption—it was one of the most well-written case studies in colonial brainwashing and subsequent decolonization that I’ve read in years. What with her POV jumping back and forth between the past and the present, you can see exactly the kind of manipulation that went into her being duped into believing in Lady Ayer and the Emperor, betraying her own identity in the process. Her change of heart wasn’t straightforward either—it was plenty messy, and it wasn’t until she actually witnessed a full-on genocide that she realized what the empire was actually doing all along, but the messiness in the middle was what made her arc so memorable. Decolonizing one’s identity is anything but straightforward, and Genevieve’s journey of restructuring her beliefs and identity was rocky—as it should have been. Genevieve alone should be proof of Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s incredible skill in crafting authentic, messy characters.
On the subject of colonization and decolonization, I also appreciate the realistic—and unrelentingly anti-colonial—approach that Tokuda-Hall took to bringing down the empire. The stakes built up over both books made them feel like a real threat, and not just a hollow “evil empire” that’s only evil because the author takes great pains to tell you so. (Basing this empire off of multiple real-life examples of colonialism probably helped, but my point still stands.) The initial takedown was was incredibly emotional, and appropriately incorporated the awesome forces of the Sea. But after that final battle, what stuck out to me the most was the epilogue; it was very brief and appropriately hopeful, but what it emphasized was so important to understanding the process of decolonization—it’s messy. Even several years after the fact, everything isn’t magically fixed—things take time to rebuild, and not everybody instantly changes their minds. In such a short amount of time, Tokuda-Hall managed to portray an essential reality of colonialism that most sci-fi and fantasy narratives miss: change isn’t instantaneous, and the limbo between changes in power is a long, messy process.
All in all, a worthy sequel that proves Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s many, incredible special talents as an author—juggling dozens of POVs with ease, writing flawed characters with complicated arcs, and giving both colonialism and decolonization with the nuance that’s often missing from fantasy and sci-fi portrayals of the subject. 4.5 stars!
The Siren, the Song, and the Spy is the sequel to The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea, and is the end of the duology. Maggie Tokuda-Hall is also the author of several picture books and graphic novels, including Also an Octopus, Love in the Library, Squad, and the forthcoming The Worst Ronin.
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, and a very merry Christmas Eve to all those celebrating!
As far as my book reviews go…yeah, well, I’ve been a bit of a Scrooge, but you can’t blame me. The finals reading slump comes for us all. Some days you just have to air out the dirty laundry. But despite the dreary color palette that ended up happening this week, I hope there’s enough jolliness here to assure you that yes, my festive cheer remains steadfast, and so does my love of ’70s guitars.
1970 was probably the worst year for trying to beat the “copying the Beatles” allegations, and the fact that these guys named themselves after an early title for “With A Little Help from My Friends” (originally titled “Bad Finger Boogie”…yeah, the name change was a good idea, John) doesn’t help their case. But I feel like being signed to Apple Records and having both Paul McCartney and George Harrison separately produce two of their other hits gets them a Get Out of Jail Free card. This once.
That aside, it also doesn’t help their case that Pete Ham sounds like the slightly growly middle ground between Paul McCartney and John Lennon, and the same nearly goes for the backing vocals, which try to hit somewhere between Lennon and Harrison. But it’s not every day that you can hit it that close to such legends, and it’s commendable no matter how (oops) you look at it. I’ve really underhyped all of this, but…there’s seriously something about this song. I swear that “No Matter What” is laced with something…oh, maybe it’s the guitars. My god, it’s barely 1970, and the ’70s guitars already sound so crisp…so full…do not get me started. But even if the guitars weren’t so sharp and full of dance-inducing warmth, there’s something so undeniably pure about this song. It’s no lyrical groundbreaker or generational anthem, but there’s a contagious joy to it—a good pop song does that. ”No Matter What” is the perfect end-credits song—the guitars start chugging in at the final shot of the movie, and everything goes black the minute that Pete Ham begins to sing. Come on, now. You can’t not go along with the clapping at 2:18. Beauty in simplicity. These guys get a pass for having either the best or the worst band name of all time. I genuinely can’t decide.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
1971 – Never a Dull Moment: The Year Rock Exploded – I…dammit. I totally thought No Dice came out in 1971. I was two months off—November of 1970. Oops. But either way, this book is a little drily written for a book that claims to “never have a dull moment,” but it’s nonetheless a fascinating insight into the absolute goldmine of good music in 1971. (There was never a better high note than ending the year with the release of Hunky Dory.)
Apparently I have another “I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams” situation on my hands here, since this blew up on TikTok sometime back in 2020 (after Spotify’s autoplay seems to have dug it up out of nowhere), and I didn’t find out until now. Maybe that was the period when the thumbnail for the music video kept popping up on YouTube and I ignored it until it went away? Little did I know what I was in for…
Also like “I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams,” I can only describe “Harness Your Hopes” as pure, bottled joy. As soon as the sighing, psychedelic-tinged intro gives way to some truly squeaky-clean guitars, I felt a rush of sheer happiness course through me. Stephen Malkmus seriously pumped this song with nothing but whimsical joy…and yet it was a B-Side? Not only that, but a B-Side that faded into more obscurity than the indie obscurity they were (probably) going for, so much so that Malkmus didn’t even recognize it when he heard it playing in a bakery? Nuts. Seriously. Not that I have any beef with the guy, but when you produce something as curiously delightful as this, you don’t let it slip through your fingers. It has that freeform, Marc Bolan kind of nonsensical lyricism written all over it, with more than a little pretentious affectation (“Leisure, a leisure suit is nothing/It’s nothing to be proud of/In this late century”), but somehow, it feels less pretentious when most of the lyrics don’t make a ton of sense as a whole. (Or maybe there’s some super deep hidden meaning that only Stephen Malkmus and co. can decipher, and it’s nothing to us normies…who knows) And like Bolan, it’s the kind of wordplay that occasionally leads to something unexpectedly romantic—”And I’m asking you to hold me/Just like the morning paper/Pinched between your pointer, your index, and your thumb.”
And paired with Malkmus’ strained, cracking voice on one end and the guitars (so clean that they’re practically still kicking up bubbles) on the other, it’s a capsule of warmth, practically radiant. Bottled joy, truly.
Please tell me I wasn’t the only one in theaters who laughed way too hard at this (besides my mom). Please.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
This Is How You Lose the Time War – Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone – for the most part, this novel lends itself more to something more cosmically sweeping and Romantic in both senses of the word (probably Spiritualized?), but lines like “and I’m asking you to hold me/Just like the morning paper/Pinched between your pointer, your index, and your thumb” might as well be straight out of the letters between Red and Blue.
hnnnnnnnnnnngh me when Noah Hawley puts a song in Fargo that connects thematically in a deeply creative way hnnnnnnngh
good god I love this season of Fargo. no complaints, this show has made me feel alive again
where were Roy and Gator Tillman on January 6th
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
A Conspiracy of Tall Men – Noah Hawley – maybe I’m cheating since I got this song from Noah Hawley. It’s fiiiiiiine. To be fair, this is his debut novel and predates the first season of Fargo by a full 16 years (it’s kind of a mess, but lovably so…mostly), but it’s got all the cross-country conspiracies and paranoia you could ever want.
I meant to review this all the way back in June or July, when this single was first released…I forget what about it made it slip out of the roster, but I knew that it had to come back eventually. Now that all of I/O is out…it’s a great album, but I can’t help but be a little disappointed at how it was constructed. I thought that the deal was that the final organization of the songs was going to be a surprise, and that they’d be reshuffled from the order they were released in with each full moon this year, but the order just ended up being the same order they were released in. (I stand by my belief that “Playing for Time” would have been the perfect closing track.) I have similarly mixed feelings about the Bright/Dark-Side Mixes—I haven’t listened to the In-Side mix yet, but I also thought that each mix of the 12 songs would be more radically different, but the differences between the mixes are often very subtle. Some of them fit more clearly than others (ex. “I/O” is clearly more fit for Bright-Side, while “The Court” lends itself more to Dark-Side), but the tweaks between mixes are sometimes barely distinguishable.
That’s not to say that I/O isn’t a great album—it’s a beautiful picture of one of the most innovative artists alive today moving into old age and still being able to produce a relentlessly creative vision of love, mortality, and the nature of connectivity. Now that I’ve seen it live, the experience is all the more enriched, what with the stunning visuals that went along with it, as well as Peter Gabriel toeing the line between a theatrical showman (how’s reenacting the creation of life itself for a show opener?) and the wise, humble figure we’ve known him to be over the years. Songs like this one really showcased both the energy and creativity that clearly haven’t waned with age. “Road to Joy” is a highlight, without a doubt; for me, this one lends itself more to the Bright-Side mix, with the funky, “Fame”-esque guitar riffs and energetic burst of the chorus, like Gonzo firing off cannons without warning. But if the pink-shaded joy doesn’t immediately jump out at you, you know what should? The fact thatthis song is proof of yet another deeply creative project that Peter Gabriel’s been cooking up since the production of OVO—so, give or take, around 23 years. The man just can’t be stopped. But according to Gabriel, “Road to Joy” is part of a story about the human mind, and this song chronicles a character being woken up after experiencing locked-in syndrome; the triumphant declaration of “You were sure I was gone” has the defiant flair of someone beating the odds, and it’s impossible not to feel the joy from that.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Under the Earth, Over the Sky – Emily McCosh – nothing like adopting a human son to awaken your frosty, dormant heart and put you on…the road to joy, maybe? Certainly some “love call[ing] through the walls.”
“Grace” has made my expectations for TANGK skyrocket, but whether or not the album turns out to be as adventurous as I feel like it’s going to be, I think I’m almost certainly going to enjoy it. It’s a change in form, even if a fleeting one.
I thought I knew what Joe Talbot sounded like when he wasn’t singing; “A Hymn” certainly gives us a hint, but there’s still the restrained growl to it that roars to life when he’s normally screaming on every other song. But “Grace” showcases his voice at its most vulnerable. Somehow, before the chorus kicked in, I almost mistook it for Mike Hadreas from Perfume Genius. I was scrambling to find the featured list for this, because…there was no way that this is the same guy who screamed at us all to never fight a man with a perm all those years ago. And I love this change in form. IDLES always mean bah-bah-business (in case you cannot tell from their tone) with their message, but this stripped-down feel that “Grace” shifts into suits their ethos just as well as their harder songs—Talbot described the song as “a call to be held,” and the quiet vulnerability really does feel like a gentle embrace. And it’s here that you can see what their change in producer has done to the sound—TANGK was co-produced by none other than Nigel Goodrich (of Radiohead fame!!), and the staccato of the drum machine and the wash of cloudy haze peeking out from under the curtain shines in the quiet places on this track. Talbot’s voice lowers into wavering smoothness, as though he’s singing from a place where no one can hear him, save for when he declares the song’s rallying cry: “No God/No king/I said, love is the fing.”
Man…I’m so excited for this album. IDLES have said repeatedly that their mission was to make an album that was purely about love and warmth—as Talbot said, “I needed love. So I made it. I gave love out to the world and it feels like magic. This is our album of gratitude and power. All love songs. All is love.” And if that isn’t exactly what we need…not to be all hippy-dippy about it, but as much as I indulge in my sad bastard music, I’m gonna go out there and say that IDLES is exactly what we need right now. I hate it that I have to say “not to be all hippy-dippy” when I’m talking about love and warmth and being kind and loving life…you’ve heard me go off about grimdark and frankly, how astoundingly dumb it is that we often think that sadder = deeper and that being happy or consuming happy media equates to stupidity somehow, but I’ll say it again. There’s nothing stupid or naïve about wanting love, giving love, and having love in your heart. IDLES get it. Love is the fing.
Ever since I read Tweet Cute and loved it about three years back, I’ve been meaning to read Emma Lord’s follow-up, You Have a Match, for ages. I’m not sure if I can just chalk it up to “I shouldn’t read anything that’s languished on my TBR for more than 3 years” because it seems like most of the Goodreads reviewers I’m seeing found it just as disappointing, but either way, this one was a miss for me.
Abby mainly decided to give a DNA service a go as a joke. But the results tell her that she has a secret sister—Savannah Tully. And Savannah isn’t just an ordinary sister—she also happens to be an influencer with a seemingly perfect life. Desperate to find out about the sister her parents hid from her, she hatches a plan to meet up with her at summer camp. But distractions from Leo, her best friend (or something more?) and co-chef at the camp, and drama between her and Savannah threaten to throw a wrench in her plan to find out why her parents separated her sister.
TW/CW: grief/loss, mentions of substance abuse, anxiety, mentions of abandonment, brief descriptions of injury and illness (broken bones, pneumonia)
I was banking on You Have a Match being at least decent just because of the memory of how good Tweet Cute was, but I really should’ve run for the hills the minute I saw the Reese’s YA Book Club sticker on it. But whether or not I’m looking at Tweet Cute through rose-colored glasses or if Emma Lord just took a dip in quality, You Have a Match was not nearly as sweet—or even enjoyable—as its predecessor.
The main issue with YouHave a Match was that it didn’t seem to know what it wanted to be. The premise (and partially the title, although it definitely applies to both) was advertised mostly as a kind of coming-of-age story of sisterhood, but the book itself also wanted to shove a fully-developed romance plot in between it all. The thing is, both of these stories could have been great as separate books—one about finding your lost sister, one about falling in love at summer camp. And I really believe that Lord could’ve succeeded with both of those stories. But even though it could have been possible to merge the two, You Have a Match felt like it didn’t know where to put the emphasis. As a result, the story felt like it needlessly jumped all over the place, making both of the plots cease to be cohesive. It really feels like a case of Lord biting off far more than she could chew.
As a result, the romance that was supposed to happen between Abby and Leo definitely suffered. So much attention was brought to the plot with Savannah and her friends that there was no room for their chemistry to develop, and by the end of the novel, none of the romance felt fleshed out in any way. All of it hinged on the reader believing the information that was very much told (certainly not shown…) that they’d had a beautiful friendship for years, and even that wasn’t enough to save the absolutely lukewarm romantic aspects of this book.
The pacing of You Have a Match didn’t help either of these issues—in fact, it was probably the reason that they were exacerbated. Once the characters got to camp, none of the timing made any sense. It felt like we were just being bounced along like a pinball from subplot A to subplot B without any room to breathe or make sense of what was happening. Everything felt transient and borderline pointless; 309 pages (for the Kindle edition) isn’t that short of a page count, but some points really did feel like filler. This is probably what could have solved the “this book doesn’t know what it wants to be” issue—cut all the filler and focus on developing the relationships between the characters, and chances are, I would’ve enjoyed it so much more.
Part of what endeared me to Tweet Cute was that the social media parts rarely came across as a Gen X author trying too hard to sound “hip.” As much as it can be, it felt real enough that the humor and romance could come through via that aspect. However, whatever internet savviness that Lord had was lost somewhere in the dust between Tweet Cute and You Have a Match. Maybe it was the shift in focus from Twitter to the whole mess that is the concept of Influencers, but it felt incredibly shallow in comparison. Despite her (eventual) redeeming qualities, Savvy came across as the most unoriginal, cardboard-cutout idea of an influencer (fit, makes green smoothies, immaculate hygiene, does yoga, etc.), but Lord could have easily subverted that idea with something that set her apart. All of the nuance came down to “influencers are people too, my life isn’t always perfect :(” and never went any further. Especially with the fact that Abby and Savvy were sisters all along, I feel like this could’ve gone so much deeper—or, at least, in a more interesting direction.
All in all, a coming-of-age, summer camp rom-com that wasted almost all of the potential that it had. 2 stars.
You Have a Match is a standalone, but Emma Lord is the author of several other novels, including Tweet Cute, Begin Again, When You Get the Chance, and the forthcoming novels The Break-Up Pact and The Getaway List.
Today’s song:
if I listen to this enough time, will I just forget that winter exists?
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
I’m finally done with the semester, so I figured I would celebrate with a festive book tag! I found this one over at The Corner of Laura (who always finds the best tags), and the tag was originally created by Browsing for Books (note: at the time I’m doing this tag, this blog is no longer active).
Let’s begin, shall we?
☕️THE HOLIDAY DRINKS BOOK TAG☕️
HOT CHOCOLATE | Marshmallows and chocolate and whipped cream, oh my!
Recommend a book that’s sweet through and through.
Rom-coms typically aren’t my go-to, but Tweet Cutewas so wonderfully fluffy and sweet—and full of tasteful food puns.
PEPPERMINT MOCHA | The flavor of peppermint is strong and distinct.
Recommend a book with a lot of strong emotions.
Our Wives Under the Seapacks an impressive amount of emotion into just over 220 pages—and all of it pays off.
APPLE CIDER | It’s so good, it can’t be good for you…but it’s from apples, that means it’s healthy, right?
Recommend a book full of characters with questionable morals.
A Memory Called Empireis rife with all sorts of political backstabbing, and just as many characters willing to turn on each other…
EGGNOG | It’s creamy and smooth with a little spice, and some people even add alcohol to it.
Recommend a book that’s mostly fun with just a hint of danger.
Flowerhearthas enough stakes (read: brief flower-related body horror) to give it a kick, but despite its flaws, what I can say is that this book was wholesome and warm all the way through. This one could’ve worked for the first prompt too…
GINGERBREAD LATTE | A drink with a veritable explosion of spices
Recommend a book with a lot of action.
Victories Greater Than Deathis absolutely chock-full of action! There was never a dull moment in this book, although it did get too heavy-handed with the action at some points.
I TAG ANYONE WHO WANTS TO PARTICIPATE! Happy holidays, everybody!
Today’s song:
That’s it for this book tag! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.
I’m finally out of finals hell! Hopefully I’ll have more time to write and read in the next month or so, but I’ll certainly be sleeping. As a celebration: songs for the beach, songs for the ocean, and songs for when you need to cry and dramatically drape a hand over your forehead. You’re totally in a movie for the latter. Totally.
Seems like I’m somewhat late on the Laufey train, but then again, she’s young and she’s certainly got tons of records ahead of her, so I suppose I’m not that late. She has, however, swept the internet for doing something almost unthinkable—her noble cause of bringing jazz to Gen Z. It’s an incredible cause to spearhead in your musical career, what with jazz being up there with country at the butt of every “I listen to everything but this” joke and not selling well as a genre for decades. I say this as somebody who falls into the former category with both of those genres, but from the scope of what I’ve heard, Laufey’s brand of jazz isn’t the kind of bland smooth jazz you hear in a spa and never hear about again. It’s the kind of dramatic, emotional vocal jazz sung by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holliday—two artists who she cites as some of her biggest musical influences.
Some of her other tracks (“From the Start” and “Falling Behind” comes to mind) spread like wildfire across social media this year, but although they weren’t enough to lift out of slightly out-of-the-ordinary background music for me, I’ll admit that my heart’s been fully captured by “Let You Break My Heart Again.” It’s the absolute best sort of high drama; the swelling instrumentation of the Philharmonia Orchestra in concert with Laufey’s low, honeyed voice make it just the sort of thing to listen to while imagining yourself leaning out the window and pretending you’re in a movie. It practically begs for flowing dresses and a hand artfully draped over your forehead. (Oh! I’m fainting…into your arms…) I’ve never been one for Disney, much less their musicals, but this song almost seems like the kind of princess’s solo number that stands the test of time. I’m also not a jukebox musical kind of person, but having this as the emotional climax while the lead actress laments into the spotlight doesn’t sound like a terrible idea. With every soft flutter in her voice, you can feel the yearning and heartache creep through the windowsill like golden-hour sunlight. I just can’t help but dramatically twirl around and collapse into my (imaginary) ballgown with every listen.
In closing, the genius who paired this song with this video deserves a raise at whatever job they’re in:
I keep having to say this, because it needs to be said: The Apples in Stereo seriously tapped into the wellspring of indie-pop magic, and we barely seem to have acknowledged that. No other band of their ilk, that I can think of, has managed to consistently produce the sheer amount of glimmering pop capsules that they have in the lifespan of their band. Under-appreciated genius, for sure.
“Glowworm” falls into that perfect category of songs that seem to be shaded in the same colors of the album cover. In this song’s case, this song glows with the same bright yellow-greens of the album art for Fun Trick Noisemaker, just like the gentle, greenish flicker of the titular glowworms and fireflies. And like the bugs it’s named after, this song feels like a swarm of gentle lights illuminating the summer night, sparking and glowing with lively energy (no pun intended). Robert Schneider’s soft voice jumps and bounces around the almost nursery rhyme-like opening lyrics (“Put a penny in the pot/Put a nickel in your pocket/Every nickel that you’ve got/Is a nickel in the slot”), opening like a storybook into a glittering tale of yearning after a reckless lover—”You just had to spend it all/Every hour, every minute/You had to make it all/Wonderful, beautiful.” Like the fleeting glow of the worm, it’s a there-and-gone kind of love—”You lived to burn.” But the ecstatic burn is one that you can instantly feel in your heart—the song makes you travel on a trail of light up into the night sky, just like fireflies.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Nothing Burns as Bright as You – Ashley Woodfolk – the song is decidedly more lighthearted (at least, that’s how it sounds) than the book, but the feeling of falling in love with a fiery, reckless person remains the same. This book, however, deals with the fallout.
“Genius Of Love” has found its way everywhere—most prominently sampled in Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” (oh, look, we’re mentioning her in December without mentioning…okay, I’m not gonna say it, that’s too easy)—and I feel like it has almost made us forget how delightfully bonkers it is. Heck, here I am in my dorm, looking at the boygenius picture that I cut out of a magazine and pasted on the wall, and it’s captioned with “genius of love.” It’s everywhere. If this song had a physical representation, it would probably be some kind of collage, but the kind that looks mindless from a distance—a bit of yarn here, some googly eyes there, and some brightly-colored but dried-out markers to color the background—but with a closer look, clearly has all the intention in the world. And yet, it’s such a meticulous pop song. I’d expect nothing less from half of the Talking Heads.
I mean, this starts off with Tina Weymouth doing a playful spoken-word segment with the affectation of a 50’s housewife in a grainy commercial: “What you gonna do when you get out of jail?/I’m gonna have some fun/What do you consider fun?/Fun, natural fun.” The delivery of that last line seriously makes me think that I’m about to be sold some kind of unnaturally green jello salad or something. But it all works so ridiculously well together. After the whole housewife bit, Weymouth’s gorgeous voice really has the chance to shine—the sincere sweetness of it makes every repetition of “I’m in heaven/With my boyfriend, my laughing boyfriend” seem nothing but genuine, like there’s a halo of cartoon hearts and bluebirds circling around her head. And the synths—they really feel like you can touch them. They pulsate and bubble and twinkle in every part of your ear. It’s no wonder that this song is one of the most sampled songs of the 80’s, especially in hip-hop and R&B from the 90’s up until as recent as last year. I’m getting mixed signals from the internet about the exact amount of times it’s actually been sampled—the sources range from around 50 to a whopping 179, but either way, the legacy of “Genius of Love” cannot be overstated. The synth heard ’round the world.
I’ve had a brief kick of collecting random Jay Som singles for my hoard, and I haven’t regretted a single second of it. Even if the songs weren’t as good as they are, I’d still come out the other side with song titles like this. This one is like a “Crocodile Tears and the Velvet Cosh” situation—if there every is another song called “O.K., Meet Me Underwater,” it’ll be copying this one.
Besides being so charmingly memorable, “O.K., Meet Me Underwater” has the advantage of being made for a Jay Som song. Her trademark of slightly off-kilter electric guitars and synths and the water-smooth ripple of how it all sounds together was made for a song title like this. All of the instrumentals already could have sounded like they were recorded from just under the surface, only slightly to the left of being muffled by a stream of bubbles rising from the depths. As Jay Som sings the chorus of “If you’re feeling okay/Meet me underwater,” every word feels like it’s being spoken just before she dips her head back down into the waves, beckoning you to follow her to some kind of colorful coral reef kingdom befitting of the cheerful glimmer of her music. Even that deliciously bouncy riff starting at 1:04 sounds like something you’d hear in the background of an ocean-themed episode ofReally Wild Animals (PLEASE tell me somebody else remembers those), or even just some cartoon they play in the background of an aquarium, complete with smiling dolphins and clam shells opening and closing to the beat. The neon yellow on the cover of the single doesn’t do nearly enough justice to the summery glow of this song—you’d need a whole, pastel-oceanic palette to capture the whole song.
I know a somewhat clever band name when I see one, but I also see a contentious one when I see it as well. The wordplay is great, but upon further reading, it looks like the Allah-Las, a band consisting of predominantly white, non-Muslim dudes from California, mostly picked the name because it was “holy-sounding.” They have faced some criticism for the name from the Muslim community over the years, and they’ve clarified that they never meant any ill will or disrespect by it, but even then, there’s still an undeniable uncomfortableness about a bunch of white guys from LA slapping the name on themselves with what seemed like very little thought behind it.
That aside, if there’s one thing white guys from California are good at doing, it’s making songs about the beach, and man, the Allah-Las nailed it. It’s not necessarily the kind of bouncy Beach Boys song that you’d expect from that descriptor—”Catamaran” takes plentiful notes from the other side of the sixties, a summertime, surfy beach walk by way of the Kinks. It’s got all the ingredients for a slightly left-of-the-dial 60’s dial bubbling in the pan—bright, jangly guitars, gentle percussion, and the kind of lyrics that sound like they could have just as easily slipped out of the mouth of the likes of Jim Morrison: “I’m an oyster pearl’s locked up in a shell/You better bring that diving bell.” What plucks the Allah-Las out of the 60’s is the kind of flat, disaffected vocals running rampant in every white guy who has ever pursued a career in indie pop—like TV Girl, it gets on my nerves for the most part, but in the sun-baked sepia of the rest of the song, it almost makes sense.
Apologies for the lack of Sunday Songs last week; the only reason I was able to get the other two posts I made last week was because they were both at least 95% pre-written—otherwise, they would have been gone, reduced to atoms, by the absolute chaos hell week of pre-finals. (Why is the period right before finals always the worst? No, it’s…no, that’s just coming back from break and having to Do Things. Yeah.) Either way, that time has given me some space to think about a change that I’ve been kicking around for a bit—adding some more to my Sunday Songs. Although these posts were originally inspired by my brother, it’s really been a fruitful experience to write about music more—The Bookish Mutant is still a book blog, but I’d be remiss if I denied that part of me. And yet…the books always come back. It’s in my nature. So now, you get your songs with a book paired to each—similarities in plot, similarities in vibes, or just similarities that bounced around my head for no reason other than free association. Bon appetit!
I so wanted to talk about last week’s songs, but as I said, last week was chaos, so I never got the time to write anything about them. But because they’re still fantastic songs, have them + last week’s graphic:
I’ve only listened to two full Lisa Germano albums (Excerpts from a Love Circus, where this song is from, and its follow-up, Slide), and I’ve discovered a method to listening to them; if you don’t want to feel the milieu of misery seep into you like mold, give it only one or two listens all the way through. Let it sit, then the individual songs (and their genius) return to you in smaller bites. That’s what’s tugged me back to the parts of Excerpts for the past month and a half since I listened to the full album for the first time—said misery notwithstanding, there’s something undeniably intoxicating about almost every track.
While it’s just as rust-smelling and heavy as most other Lisa Germano song you can pull out of a hat, what makes “Bruises” stand out is the folksy, almost Celtic sway that surrounds it. After the interlude of plaintive mewling, courtesy of her cat Dorothy (originally meant to bookend “A Beautiful Schizophrenic (‘Where’s Miamo-Tutti?’ by Dorothy)”, arguably the album’s most “mom, come pick me up, I’m scared” track), the first thing that jumps out at you is the dipping lilt of the violins; they passionately bay and lurch like dancers against the steadiness of the acoustic guitars and humming, cavernous synths, the same that frame another favorite of mine from the album, “Baby On The Plane.” And Germano’s voice, mainly defined by its wispiness in many of her songs, rises to meet the violins, her high notes ringing out in strained, rasping harmony as she cries out the chorus of “bruises, bruises, bruises, bruises,” dragging out the last repetition as easily as guiding the strings of a marionette. Her harmonies twist together like ghosts rising out from the cracks of the underworld, weaving through the violin strings. “Bruises” has the creaking sway of a rocking chair, but not in the way of being curled into grandmother’s lap while she reads a story; like “Crash,” the looping, ouroboros rhythm seeps into Germano’s words of repetition and depression, mindlessly going through the motions; the exhausted delivery of “make it better, alright” hammers in her struggle to wake from the stupor, sleepwalking through life as she struggles to even get out of bed in the first place. It has the rhythm of a slow dance, but all of the dancers are stumbling over their own feet, heads hanging, hands slipping apart and missing cues and steps.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:Summer Bird Blue – Akemi Dawn Bowman – even though this novel deals specifically with grief, the combination of Bowman’s very real, very heavy depiction of the lows of Rumi’s mental health and the way the melody seems to bob up and down like the waves of the ocean make this a solid fit in my eyes.
I’ve only come up with more recent songs as examples for this, but there’s something about adding animal sounds near the end of songs to add to the eeriness—sounds that wouldn’t normally be dread-inducing, but amp up the dread of the song. The most prominent example I can think of is the dogs barking at the end of Mitski’s “I’m Your Man”—the dog/hounds theme of the song notwithstanding, as soon as you start to hear them desperately baying in the background, interwoven with crickets and other nighttime sounds, you instantly get the feeling that something is very, very wrong. Fun way to end an album, huh?
The animals used in “Ptolemaea” are much more plainly sinister from the start—with the moaning, creeping dread that immediately swallows you only seconds into the song, the swarm of buzzing flies that trickle into your ears like a slow drip of poison shortly after is an immediate alarm bell. When I heard the flies, I heard them circling around something rotten. Something putrid is not too far away, and the flies have come to land on your skin feed on you next. Uncomfortably landing on your skin is something that “Ptolemaea” instantly does—it’s a truly astounding piece of art, but it’s astoundingly icky for all of its six plus minutes. And yet there’s something instantly, drowningly consuming about it—the instrumentation in the last half has a hard rock, almost goth tidal wave that wants to bring you down with it into the cold, unforgiving depths. And like a dog-eared, pocket Bible with a battered cover and flaking pages, the sonic layers seem infinite, from the chilling, low incantations of perverse, religious verses, to the blood-curdling cry of “STOP!” that marks the song’s halfway point. I can’t help but be in absolute shock at this song—I seem to remember being openmouthed with giddy surprise when That Part kicked in while driving with my brother. I can’t listen to this song too often, lest I get consumed by the creeping dread, and I also feel guilty having those giddy feelings about the second half of this song, when it’s so clearly alluding to some form of abuse and/or sexual assault. But from what I know about the whole Ethel Cain project, it was born out of a desire to explore a history of religious trauma, abuse, and queerness, and that is, at its best, is one of the best qualities of art—to weave all these things into something new to reach out to others; in Cain’s case, the results are unfathomably harrowing, but undoubtedly masterful.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:Extasia – Claire Legrand – would you like your creeping dread and explorations of queer girlhood and religious trauma with a side of towering entities in the woods?
Don’t you love doing mundane, peaceful things and listening to albums that are the exact opposite of mundane and peaceful? Nothing like cleaning up the bathroom and quietly rearranging my bulletin board while Joe Talbot is screaming in my ears.
I finally, finally got around to listening to Ultra Mono over break, and for the most part, it was sheer fun all the way through. Apparently, it’s regarded a little lower in the ranks for some IDLES fans; in contrast to some of their other albums, this seems to be where they went full in on the aggressively positive theme, and for a lot of people, it seemed to come off as corny. And…yeah, I don’t buy it. I understand the gripes about “War,” the album’s first track—the onomatopoeia is fun, but it doesn’t make sense at all. And as much as I enjoy it, I see where a lot of the criticism comes for “Ne Touche Pas Moi“—Riot Grrl did aggressive songs about consent first, and IDLES seems to have respected that history, but there’s something to be said for a bunch of aggressive, sweaty British men who look like they could beat you to a pulp singing about “Your body is your body/And it belongs to nobody but you.” (Plus, at least they had a woman—Jehnny Beth—shout the rallying cry of “ne touche pas moi.”) I’d feel safe walking home at night with these dudes. But either way, this is how I see it: we have a sea of songs this aggressive, but that are all about how edgy you are and how much everything sucks, so as far as I’m concerned, IDLES are a breath of fresh air. The screamy edgelords and their corresponding emotions have their place (sometimes), but they’ve had their moment in the sun. KINDNESS!
As the title suggests, this song pretty much sums up the entire IDLES ethos—aggressive positivity. If you isolated the lyrics from the song, you’d probably get some accusations along the lines of “you dirty hippie(s),” but that’s what makes it so memorable—it’s earnest, it’s loud, and it’s relentlessly optimistic. But this killing with kindness isn’t the kind you associate with smiling, doing nothing, and letting yourself be stagnant or stepped on—as Talbot declares, “Ain’t no doormats here/It doesn’t mean you have to bow, or say “Your Highness”/Just kill ’em with kindness/If you wanna beat the machine, keep your teeth clean.” And what better to cement that than circles of dancing, anthropomorphic flowers and a grinning, rubberhose-style Joe Talbot spoon-feeding some kind of kindness serum to a scowling beefcake who was beating up a bunch of other guys just a few minutes earlier? It’s nothing short of delightful. IDLES are a blessing.
…and I’m seeing them in May!! WOO!!
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT: Chameleon Moon – RoAnna Sylver – it’s not in the title, but it’s in the subgenre. What better word to describe both this and IDLES but hopepunk?
I’m 100% admitting to my status as a poser with regards to this song, because I haven’t even seen When Harry Met Sally, the movie where this version of “It Had to Be You” originally comes from. That being said, “baby fish mouth” has been permanently ingrained into my psyche thanks to my parents.
A fact that I always forget whenever I listen to this song: not only has Harry Connick, Jr. had a flourishing jazz career that starts as far back as recording in the studio for the first time at age 10, he’s also…
…yeah, oh my god. Dean has insane pipes.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:The Spare Man – Mary Robinette Kowal – I was 100% grasping at straws for this one, but The Iron Giantwould have objectively been cheating (and for once, the movie is objectively better than the book in every conceivable way). To be fair, I don’t read a whole lot of historical fiction, particularly the kind that would lend itself to this kind of big band drama, but with the lighthearted, noir feel (in space!) of this book makes me convinced that this song could’ve been in playing in the background of the bar on the opulent space liner where The Spare Man is set.
In terms of Jay Som’s catalogue, it seems that this song is one teeter away from disappearing into the ether—it was part of the Polyvinyl 4-Track Singles series (which has included artists such as Kishi Bashi, The Dodos, and of Montreal over the years) back in 2017, but as of now, the official audio on YouTube has only 10 likes (including mine, teehee) and nothing comes up when you google the lyrics. Well, nothing relevant. The top result is for the lyrics of “The Bus Song” (always fantastic), but by the time you start scrolling through several other Jay Som songs that aren’t “Lose”, it turns into…Jay Z and Coldplay, for some reason? Oof. Kinda rough. And although I’m all for being a petty hater and being bitter about songs I like getting popular and/or songs I like starting to be liked by popular people, there is no need for this song to keep going under the radar. It’s too delicately wonderful for such under-appreciation, dammit!
In my mind, the ascending notes that make up “Lose” fall somewhere between Wilco and the Beatles. It’s got that meticulous, stair-step climb in both the rhythm and the main riff that could have made up the framework for something off of Star Wars or Revolver just as easily. It’s a progression that immediately crawls into your brain, and I’d be lying if I didn’t enjoy every minute that it took up the space inside of mine. Jay Som’s signature dreamy haze of grainy lo-fi makes it sound like you can hear the gentle pitter-patter of rain trickling against the windows of wherever the song was recorded—regardless of whether or not it actually was raining, the flickering warmth that permeates through all of her songs shows its face here. Somehow, it’s the perfect soundtrack for being under a blanket forth while it rains outside. You’ve got a flashlight propped up in the corner, and it makes everything look gently orange and yellow as you uncomfortably squeeze yourself against the side of the couch you propped your blankets up against. There’s a bag of snacks somewhere, and now, your pillow feels just right.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:A City Inside – Tillie Walden – more in vibes than anything, but Walden’s art style, with its muted, flat hues and beautiful simplicity, lends itself to this drifting air of most of Jay Som’s music, even if this single didn’t have the album art that it has.
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!
Far be it from me to start the month off with a negative review, but that’s just how my December started off. Eh. Should be a lesson to me for trying to read something that’s been on my TBR for 3+ years—my tastes generally don’t change dramatically in that amount of time, but my standards for writing and plot certainly did. That’s all to say that The Witch King was a promising, inclusive fantasy that quickly proved itself to be not worth my time.
Wyatt Croft is a witch, and in the North American realm of the fae, witches are the enemy. Years ago, Wyatt’s magic got out of control, forcing him to flee back to the human world and go into exile. But his betrothal to Emyr, the prince of the fae, has not dissolved, and Emyr is back on the hunt for him. Forced back into the world of the fae, Wyatt must come to terms with his engagement—one that may hold the lives of all of North America’s witches in the balance. And his feelings for Emyr may be coming back, as much as he wants to hide them…
The Witch King has made me realize that I need to expand my criteria for DNFing books; most of my DNFs are 1-star books—the ones that are just so bad that I can’t finish them. In comparison to a lot of the other books on my DNF shelf, The Witch King wasn’t comparably as bad. But the difference is that at a certain point, it was just so clear to me that this book was not worth my time. I really wanted to like it, but once I got past the first third, there wasn’t any point in me finishing this book. A DNF is not always a 1-star read, but a 1-star read is not always a DNF. It’s like geometry but easier to explain.
I wanted to emphasize that I really wanted to like The Witch King. But in the 3+ years that this book has languished on my TBR, it’s clear that my standards have changed. The foreword by Edgmon was incredibly touching, and it’s so clear that this was the book of their soul—there’s no denying the love that went into this book. And it’s so, so important to support trans authors like him, but it’s just as important to remember that even when you read diversely, a book’s diversity doesn’t automatically fix every plot hole and writing issue. There’s some slack I’m willing to give Edgmon because this was his debut, but The Witch King really left a ton to be desired.
It’s clear that Edgmon put a lot of thought into constructing Wyatt’s character, but in his quest to make him as relatable as possible, Wyatt turned from simply “relatable” to an incompetent mess. Even as a queer person, there’s only so many “I am a gay little worm who makes terrible life decisions” (actual quote from the book) jokes I can take. Jesus Christ. The word “cringe” is outright abused these days, but I feel like this is a valid quality to ascribe to the writing of The Witch King, since most of the humor feels so overdone and unfunny. If your type of humor consists of Tumblr jokes from 2017, then boy, do I have the book for you. All of the attempts to make Wyatt seem more human and fallible made him just feel like a pathetic mess incapable of seeing past his personal faults and (many) mistakes. It absolutely grated on me after a certain point. The rest of the writing wasn’t all bad, but good god, Wyatt’s characterization made me want to jump ship almost immediately.
Since I abandoned ship after the first third, there’s probably some context that I inevitably missed, but the worldbuilding of the North American fae really left a ton to be desired. Apart from the rivalry between witches and fae, there really wasn’t much of an explanation as to how the fae worked in tandem with the human world: where do the borders between human and fae begin and end? How do the two interact? And more importantly, what are the different interactions between the different species of fae? There were a bunch of different creatures that were just thrown at you in the background with zero explanation, never to be seen again. There’s a difference between convoluted worldbuilding and worldbuilding that just isn’t properly thought-out, and this fell firmly into the latter camp. It was all just a hot mess. I’ve read several reviews saying similar things about the worldbuilding, so…I guess it never did get better beyond what I read? Oof.
That being said, I really appreciate the diversity that Edgmon wrote into The Witch King. Having a trans main character is so important, and as much as Wyatt got on my nerves, characters like him need to be in the spotlight. Edgmon presented a lot of character that were very diverse in terms of race, gender, and sexuality, and while it seems like the representation wasn’t all accurate and some of Edgmon’s depiction of social issues wasn’t handled as well as it could’ve been (glad I didn’t get to that part, I guess…), it’s always good to have a range of characters like that. It’s about all I have to say about The Witch King that’s positive, but it’s worth being highlighted.
All in all, a diverse fantasy debut that sadly crashed and burned in its characterization and lazy worldbuilding. 2 stars.
The Witch King is the first book in the Witch King duology, followed by The Fae Keeper. Edgmon is also the author of the Ouroboros series, which consists of Godly Heathens and Merciless Saviors.
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!
The Bookish Mutant 