Tag: Cate Le Bon

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 10/4/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: Madeline gets annoying about shoegaze and Björk again. Plus, Robyn Hitchcock songs that make you go “wahoo! Hell yeah!”

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 10/4/26

“Tugboat” – Galaxie 500

It’s been an embarrassingly long time coming for me to write about this song. I found out about it at least a month ago on the same BBC Radio 6 interview with mary in the junkyard that I discovered Jessica Pratt through. Admittedly, I talked about Jessica Pratt two weeks ago, and I’d had that revelation at least two weeks before I’d made the damn post. Sorry, excuse me while I pull down the massive Wizard of Oz curtain here…not that anybody really cared all that much about the timing here. There’s always a fair amount of lag in terms of the songs I’m writing about. Breaking my silence…

Anyways. Galaxie 500’s Today was drummer David Addison’s pick for his album. One way or another, I probably would’ve found my way to Galaxie 500 given how much I love shoegaze (and. Luna, for that matter), but I’m not complaining that today (figuratively) is the day. Plus, as the leaves around my apartment start to turn orange and the air turns sharp and chilly, it feels like the perfect environment to drift off to “Tugboat.” Even without the nautical title and lyric references, this track meanders like it’s a slow, lumbering boat miles away from the nearest coastline. Dean Wareham—who I didn’t even make the connection to until my dad pointed out that it was him—laments in a crooked rasp about wanting to be the one sailing that ship: “I don’t wanna stay at your party/I don’t wanna talk to your friends/I don’t wanna vote for your president/I just wanna be your tugboat captain.”

It’s 1/3rd love song, 1/3rd wistful plea to escape it all, and 1/3rd classic shoegaze freakout; once the repeated verse and chorus (if you can call them that) disappear into the mist, never to be seen again, Wareham launches into a spidery guitar riff as reverb swallows what remains of the song whole, like some sort of biblical leviathan. And sure, I’ll eat up some classic noisy shoegaze riff action any day of the week, but to me, it feels very thematically significant: after Wareham lays out his lament of wanting to escape, the last third of the song loses its structure, its DNA dissolving; to me, that’s exactly the escape he was looking for, and the tugboat captain has made his maiden voyage.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Celestial Seas – T.A. Chan – “I don’t wanna talk to your friends/I don’t wanna vote for your president/I just wanna be your tugboat captain…”

“Hyperballad” (Live at the Royal Albert Hall) [Björk cover] – Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Just writing down “acoustic Björk cover” feels offensive to me. For the majority of her catalogue, it’s a kind of unholy combination that really shouldn’t exist. How do you reduce the soundscapes of an artist who specializes in creating veritable jungles with sampling, synth textures, and percussion? It just feels like sacrilege to see all that and go “welp, lemme whip out the acoustic guitar…anyways, here’s Wonderwall, amirite?”

Fortunately, Yeah Yeah Yeahs are no stranger to sacrilege. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) To be fair to them, it’s not fully acoustic—it’s a live cut from Hidden in Pieces, performed at the Royal Albert Hall with a full string section. And if there was anybody that understands the pioneering spirit of Björk, it’s one of the many daring women that she inspired to get weird with it: Karen O. Even having been a Yeah Yeah Yeahs fan for over a decade, it seemed like this was territory that even they couldn’t succeed in, and boy, was I wrong. Of course, nothing beats Björk’s original, but there’s something about this understated, almost humbled take on this classic. Only accompanied by said guitar and the melancholy strings section, it takes the lyrics—a private exorcism to keep a relationship afloat—in a softer, strangely ashamed direction. Karen O’s vocals are, as expectedly, nothing short of heavenly, but they lend a sort of whispery, bittersweet pang to an already emotional song, heavy with the weight of sacrifice.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Deep – Rivers Solomon – “I go through all this/Before you wake up/So I can feel happier/To be safe up here with you…”

“It’s a Mystic Trip” – Robyn Hitchcock

Robyn Hitchcock recently released Invisible Hitchcock, his collection of rarities, outtakes, and demos that was previously only available on cassette and CD back in the day, on Bandcamp last month. Other than the absolutely glorious cover, with Hitchcock somewhat menacingly showing you his radishes, is finally seeing the light of day for the first time since the ’80s, there’s one key reason why Invisible Hitchcock made me so excited. Why? Four words: “It’s a Mystic Trip.” Fuck yeah, finally!!

WAHOO!! HELL YEAH!!!! Or, in the words of the man himself, YAYSVILLE!! Listen, my poor dad didn’t get his justice after requesting this song at the most recent show and not hearing it, but at least “It’s a Mystic Trip” is more widely available (and in better audio quality than YouTube). About time, too, because this song is just joyous. I genuinely feel something close to ecstatic every time I listen to it, to the point where whichever neighbors saw me having a solo dance party to it definitely contemplated calling a hotline of some kind.

Dating somewhere back to the early ’80s, post-Soft Boys and at the beginning of his burgeoning solo career, Hitchcock described the songs on Invisible Hitchcock as offcuts from a period from “when New Romantics were at their zenith, I felt more comfortable clutching radishes outside a garden shed than trying to hang out in the Club for Heroes or the Batcave. I couldn’t get my quiff together, nor did I really want the digital patina sprinkled over my songs that seemed obligatory for 1980s pop music.” Keeping that timeframe in mind, “It’s a Mystic Trip” feels like the point where Hitchcock’s creative floodgates burst straight open. After The Soft Boys, who retained a punk sound while lyrically bucking up against tradition, this song goes headfirst, no holds barred, into straight-up psychedelia. His riffs seem to dance against the beat, which has the rhythm of the world’s most confident strut down a brick street. Compared to this, the Soft Boys’s lyrics sound like he’s holding back—he’s spouting the absolute quirkiest nonsense with the self-assured confidence of a time traveler peddling prophecies from the far, far future. Occasionally he veers into the exasperation of a checked-out British mother from the ’50’s at the objectively bonkers scenes unfolding in front of him: “Janice, don’t squat in the nettles/Last week, three people came in to be dignified/And they all got stung.” And to give you an idea of the average trajectory of “It’s a Mystic Trip,” here’s what comes immediately afterwards: “Lucy put her bean in her nostril/And Mr. Watkins said, ‘well, where there’s a barrel, there’s a bung!'” Naturally. It’s so British. But though it’s absurd through and through, there’s a relentless happiness to it. To me, even if it’s adjacent to the lyrics, “It’s a Mystic Trip” represents the moment where Hitchcock felt truly confident in breaking free of the mold, and setting carefree impulse in his songwriting free. I’d never call Hitchcock cringe (even affectionately, as somebody who’s embraced the cringe long ago) but it really does ring true to “to be cringe is to be free”: your best work comes along when you throw convention straight out the window.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Railsea – China Miéville – I sometimes struggle pairing books with Robyn Hitchcock songs, and this one was no different. To me, Railsea has that same spirit of being relentlessly, batshit weird and reveling in throwing expectations to the winds. Shoutout to weird British dudes, I guess.

“Hollow Trees House Hounds” – Cate Le Bon

I’ve done it. I’ve scaled the mountain. Minus a few EPs, I’ve listened to Cate Le Bon’s entire discography. I effectively went backwards, since Me Oh My was her debut album. The St. Vincent comparisons are inevitable, but Me Oh My is very much her Marry Me, not just temporally but sonically. It has the kind of relentless, freewheeling energy of somebody letting it all out and trying everything, and it serves as a time capsule of a weirdo’s first solo foray into the music world. There’s a slightly more cohesive sound than Marry Me, but it has that same late 2000’s indie precociousness to it. It veers into being to twee at times, and honestly, her keyboard choices weren’t doing her any favors for a good half of the album. I hate to slander my queen here, but that fake organ noise makes her sound like the weird Christian lady from Edward Scissorhands in some places. But as a whole, it’s a portrait of a budding weirdo who would eventually hold the torch for many more weirdos to follow. The seeds are all sprouting here, and the blooms that are coming up look alien.

What I didn’t add about finishing Cate Le Bon’s discography is that my brother beat me to the punch. The student has become the master, etc. But he was the one who shared “Hollow Trees House Hounds,” and it kind of ruined Me Oh My for me because it’s the best track on the album by a long shot. It’s just a kooky delight. Out of the whole album, which is mostly acoustic, it’s one of the few rockier tracks, and it really does rock—the chunky guitar chords and the drums make it an instant boot-stomper. The riffs in between skitter and scramble, and all the while, Le Bon is spinning a surreal tale. From the start, she was already getting weird with the lyrics—I mean, look at the title—but the imagery of overgrown moss and vines and a forest to conquer is nothing but her. But I think the outro is an amazing foreshadowing of her career; the repetition of “No room for me/I’m serpentine” is the perfect distillation of her consistent refusal to be boxed in and her penchant for daring, unconventional musical choices. Plus, the shrillness of it reminds me of St. Vincent’s “Now Now”—the “You don’t mean that/Say you’re sorry” bit in particular.

I can’t not mention the music video, which is somewhere between Radiohead’s “There There” and Björk’s “Human Behaviour”—and “Bachelorette,” for that matter—it reeks of the Michel Gondry/Chris Hopewell influence, but with way more beheadings. Which is to say that neither of the examples I just listed had any beheadings at all. Kaiju Cate Le Bon can’t catch a break. But like Me Oh My, it’s totally offbeat and kooky, and very meticulously animated with magazine cutouts and whatnot. Once again, very late 2000’s-early 2010’s, but I miss that era of music videos.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Lightfall: The Girl and the Galdurian – Tim Probert – more than fitting for a fantastical gallivant through strange, magical lands.

“No Thank You, I Love You, Goodbye” – Lucy Dacus

To quote one of the top YouTube comments on this video, “Phoebe set me up, Lucy knocked me down.” None of us were ready to get emotionally sniped by this. Lucy, diva, I know that No Burden turned 10 recently, but LET US BREATHE FOR A MINUTE before unleashing something like this! Christ. Either way, I’m not about to look a gift horse in the mouth, because “No Thank You, I Love You, Goodbye” is an excellent track. Originally a rarity recorded during the sessions for No Burden, it’s a revived time capsule from 2016, shaking with the same angst that colored the album. Amidst an onslaught of reverb that feels strong enough to drag somebody into the riptide, Dacus recounts being dragged along by a lover’s careless antics: “You used to scare me/Bottle on the dashboard/Reckless abandon, abandoning me/I swore to myself I would not follow your lead/So why did I get in the car every evening?” The churning chug of the production, grainy and building to an implosion we never hear, accentuates Dacus’s mounting feelings of being trapped in a corner, knowing that it’s nearly too late to save herself. But save herself she does—she lets the song peter out, as though leading a limping, wounded animal to safety, letting it fade into soft but firm promises: “Put me to rest, to rest/Say ‘no thank you, I love you, goodbye.'”

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Nothing Burns as Bright as You – Ashley Woodfolk – “You used to scare me/Bottle on the dashboard/Reckless abandon, abandoning me/I swore to myself I would not follow your lead/So why did I get in the car every evening?”

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (9/29/26) – Sunward

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

It feels like this is my first time reading William Alexander, but technically it isn’t. My first experience of his writing was ages ago; I picked up his MG novel Goblin Secrets when I was about 10 or 11 (I think? My memory’s hazy on it, to be honest) and didn’t like it. But I wasn’t the best judge of taste back then (even if the average ratings for Goblin Secrets are rather low), and plus, Sunward was his first book for adults, and things are bound to have changed.

For whatever reason, it’s so difficult to find sci-fi books by Latine authors. I don’t know if it’s the publishing industry or some other thing, but I feel like for Latine authors specifically, they’re so few and far between. That’s part of why I was so excited to see Sunward out in the wild. I’m so glad to report that although past Madeline didn’t like Goblin Secrets, Sunward is not to be missed.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Sunward – William Alexander

When faced with the decision to follow in her parents’s footsteps as interplanetary politicians, Tova Lir chose a quieter life. She works as an interstellar courier, ferrying private communications across the solar system. But her spaceship doubles as a nursery—Tova raises sentient AIs whose consciousnesses are still on the levels of children and teenagers. When Agatha Panza von Sparkles (she named herself), one of her AI wards, experiences the splintering of her consciousness, Tova has to seek answers in the last place that she wants to go: Earth’s moon, where a deadly explosion has been pinned on its robot population. With the help from her former AI wards, Tova must cross the solar system to save Agatha’s mind from disappearing entirely.

TW/CW: racism, child death, descriptions of injury

Sunward clearly felt like a first-time attempt at a sci-fi novel; there’s less emphasis on the hard mechanics of the worldbuilding, and even with the strong AI element, it rarely veers into any grounded science. Even as a certified sci-fi girlie, that’s not a dig at William Alexander in the slightest. In fact, that’s part of why I loved Sunward so much. It wasn’t burdened by any of the rigid genre conventions that some authors adhere to, and it frequently bucked against what sci-fi is “supposed to be.” Alexander was unafraid to make his solar system unabashedly quirky—it almost felt like Wes Anderson’s take on straight-up sci-fi post-Asteroid City, from the precocious characters to the charm of the solar system’s cultures. There’s a sun-based cult on Mercury. The Moon has wacky mushroom architecture. The gang runs into a theater troupe of mostly robots that perform Twelfth Night in sign language. There’s a pretentious poet and her screaming parrot. Some of the more deliberately twee bits (ex. Agatha Panza von Sparkles) did get grating at times, but for the most part, it made for such a delightful novel. It’s just so charming and strange, and I loved every second of being in Alexander’s new solar system.

As a whole, the worldbuilding of Sunward was a mixed bag. But something that Alexander really excelled at in this novel was the cultural aspects of the worldbuilding. Our solar system is flung far into the future, with human settlements on many of the planets familiar to us, but each of them felt so culturally distinct. Alexander did such an amazing job feel like every planet’s people was unique, and even within the planets, giving them different groups and points of conflict. The same goes for his depictions of human-robot relations; they also differed from planet to planet, but different characters had different culturally specific reasons for the positions that they had. In particular, I loved the whole group of people isolated on a spaceship that developed their own sign language after an illness rendered most of the crew Deaf—that was a fascinating aspect, and I loved that unique inclusion in the novel. It was just so clear that there was tons of thought put into this future vision of the solar system, and I loved it.

Of course, you all know that I’m a sucker for found family. It’s old news at this point, but loving stories like this has made me picky about which ones actually feel like family. Sunward, in the end, knocked it out of the park. Tova was such a strong character, and I loved that her stoic outward presence didn’t contradict the love that she had for her robot children and the people around her—in fact, it only enhanced the protectiveness she felt for them. She was a great protagonist, but the side characters made this novel shine even more. Sunward’s dynamic was way more of a dysfunctional found family, which is pretty much par for the course, considering that this novel is basically just a solar system-wide quest to reunite all of Tova’s AI children. Tova’s getting the band back together, and it…doesn’t go to plan. Alexander did a great job of meshing all of the characters’s clashing desires and making this found family painfully chaotic, but still funny. It’s very much “we’ve all been tossed together in this spaceship with a vague common goal, and we all have to tough it out,” but by the end, in spite of all the squabbling, they stick together. That being said, a lot of the characters were too underdeveloped for it to fully feel like a family until the last few chapters. I would’ve loved Sunward to be longer for several reasons, and this was the most prominent one for sure. But for what it was, Sunward’s resonant love for family and sympathy for outsiders made it a tenderly emotional novel.

Unfortunately, that first-time sci-fi writer element that I praised earlier dragged Sunward down in some places. While I was willing to suspend my disbelief for a lot of this novel, there was a complete lack of context for a few too many of the worldbuilding elements. Sunward is set in our solar system, but the only context that Alexander gives us is that we’re “far in the future.” We don’t know the year, how many centuries it’s been since we’ve colonized the stars, and how long that took. Listen—I don’t need all of the answers, but given that Earth has been abandoned for nebulous reasons, we still retain some pop culture from antiquated Earth eras, and there’s some semblance of advanced technology, it would’ve helped to have at least a rough timeline of how we colonized the solar system, and more importantly, why. The same would’ve helped with some context around the human-robot tensions, but that was at least easier to extrapolate from context clues; still, I would’ve liked more than just vibes and ideas that haven’t been hashed over in other robot-related sci-fi. Granted, I thoroughly enjoyed Sunward, but it desperately needed some more ground to stand on in terms of the worldbuilding.

All in all, a heartfelt and quirky vision of our solar system in the future, and the love that brings people together within it. 4 stars!

Sunward is a standalone and William Alexander’s first novel for adults. He is also the author of several other books for children, including Goblin Secrets, Ghoulish Song, Ambassador, Nomad, A Properly Unhaunted Place, and A Festival of Ghosts.

Today’s song:

I’ve finally listened to Cate Le Bon’s entire discography (album-wise)…Me Oh My is my least favorite, but it’s still so fun

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 9/13/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: at this rate, I could probably condense material from several previous posts to just have a whole album review of Pompeii. Plus, Bill Callahan gets existential, Lisa Germano gets sarcastic, and The Ladybug Transistor gets…very Elephant 6.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 9/13/26

“Why Do Men Sing” – Bill Callahan

Last week, I was concerned about Bill Callahan going through it back during the era of Red Apple Falls. That sense of isolation thankfully seems to be behind him, but these days, it seems like he’s having a different kind of existential crisis. His newest album, My Days of 58, came out in February of this year, and it seems he had a mission to pick apart all of the questions that seem to emerge in the midst of a midlife crisis. “Why Do Men Sing,” the album’s opener, gets right to the meat of it: why is he still attached to this craft in the first place? I love the slowly-building meander of it, the acoustic strummings that are gradually strung with horns, harmonies, and electric guitars—it’s a song that languishes in all seven of its minutes, giving a weight to its stream-of-consciousness stylings. Callahan doesn’t necessarily answer his central question—it’s repeated over and over in the chorus, but he leaves the answer in the realm of ambiguity. But if there’s ever a sign that you’re artistically on the right track, it’s the visitation from Lou Reed beyond the veil that Callahan describes. (He even adopts a bit of Reed’s New York affect in several places in the song, which is a lot of fun.) His advice? “It’s cool, baby. Just got to let it ride.” First off, that sounds exactly like something he’d say, but I think that’s where the not-answer lies. There’s no one, concrete answer to the question Callahan poses. Creativity’s meaning is unique to you, but more importantly, the many meanings come from the winding journey you’re on. Let it ride, baby.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut – the existential absurdity of this track feels very Vonnegut, in spirit if nothing else.

“Wheel” – Cate Le Bon

Shit, I’ve probably talked about at least half of Pompeii at this point. I’ve run the whole gamut of emotions about it; at first, it was more just “this is a great album, but the second half lags a bit” to “wait, that second half really doesn’t lag” to now, where I’m certain that it’s at least a top 10 album for me. The more I dissect everything about it—the origins, the lyrics, the aesthetic, the Cate Le Bon of it all—the more I adore it as an exercise in processing loneliness and isolation.

From the start, I loved “Wheel” as a closing track. Like its namesake, the blasts of distorted saxophone feel like the melody is eating itself, being born, dying, and being reborn in the space of a few beats. The synthy sway of it reminds me of St. Vincent at her weirdest. Its echoing lament made the track feel like it was ushering the end of the narrative into the fog, as ephemeral as the glow of a lighthouse. But it took me years to get why this album—and this song—got me. I think it was because I found it during a time when I was mired in some woefully self-imposed self-isolation, and something about that sensation planted a beacon in me, one that slowly but surely helped clear the fog. I loved the music, then I loved the aesthetic charm, and then wham: here comes “I do not think that you love yourself/I’d take you back to school/And teach you right/How to want a life/But it takes morе time than you’d tender.” FUCK.

Le Bon told Apple Music that this track was “more direct than the rest of the record. I was struggling to call people over the pandemic. What do you say?…I missed him, but couldn’t pick up the phone.” The circular feel of the melody now gives the image of somebody stumbling time after time over the same, self-imposed hurdle, like feeling your mouth clamming up before you can say what you desperately need to say. And it lodged itself in me deeply—even outside of said self-isolation, I relate painfully to that feeling of knowing that you want to connect more deeply with people, but agonizing so much over what to say, what to do, that it comes too late. Somehow, it feels more digital—especially given the pandemic context—it’s a feeling I experience way more when connecting with people over texts. I feel the urge spill over, desperate to say everything that you want to say, but then that mental barrier clogs your repository of words, anxiety freezing your hands. That previous lyric I referenced (beginning with “I do not think that you love yourself”) perfectly encapsulates that feeling of having an armful of things to say and do, but feeling inadequate when the time comes to condense them into something comprehensible, even if it’s just “hey man, do you want to hang out on Thursday?” Back to “I do not think that you love yourself”—I feel like it’s both Le Bon addressing these friends, but also herself, in a way: seeing yourself suspended in your current state, but frozen in the moment, you’re just observing yourself pacing in circles.

In this light, the outro of “no prisoner, no peace” feels like a call to arms. I’m still chewing on it. The prisoner is, to my understanding, herself, locked in these patterns: from there, “no peace” is the resulting state from being the prisoner of your own patterns. Le Bon repeats it like a storm warning, letting it crash against the waves: you’ll have no peace while you’re still a prisoner of these unsaid thoughts. And to end Pompeii, a study of being stir-crazy and vulnerably self-reflective in Le Bon’s childhood home during the pandemic, feels like the solution to claw through the dirt and see the light of day again. No prisoner, no peace indeed.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Heaven’s Graveyard – Grace Curtis – “It’s been a mild winter here/And I’ve buckled like a wheel/Sucked the life from god’s routine/Broke the royal we…”

“Twangy Wig-Out” – Transvision Vamp

I’d only heard of Transvision Vamp from songs off of their final album, Little Magnets Versus the Bubble of Babble, so it came as a surprise to discover that this album was their critically panned finale after several years of UK Number One singles in the ’80s. Of course, it’s reportedly pretty different from a lot of their earlier work, hence why it was initially barred from release in the UK by their record label. There’s nothing here that would suggest that Wendy James and co. were pop stars—I could see them being underground neo-psychedelia legends only going off of this. But it seems like that’s exactly what they wanted to do, after years of smearing by the UK music press (often at James’s expense, with many a misogynist insult hurled in her direction). “Twangy Wig-Out” has some pop genealogy, but it’s pure, British psychedelia—you can’t get much trippier than this. Its dreamlike prediction makes you feel like you’re stumbling through somebody else’s movie-montage drug trip, complete with lyrics that are the exact kind of thing you could only find deep if you got really, really stoned. (“‘Art is the mind set free’/She says, I don’t know any real artists?’ Shiiiiit, dude, that’s deep…[cough] pass the blunt…”) On its own, it’s a real fun track, but as a stylistic rebellion against a label (and a country) that wanted to kick them to the curb, it’s even more enjoyable.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick – admittedly, I didn’t particularly like this novel, but you can’t get much druggier than this.

“Rushes of Pure Spring” – The Ladybug Transistor

Right off the bat: The Ladybug Transistor is an awesome band name. It also sounds like the kind of name you’d make up for a fake band to sound more pretentious than you are at a party. Oh, you haven’t heard of The Ladybug Transistor? Name three songs, poser. Their song and album titles only accentuate the vibe. Oh, you clearly haven’t heard of their critically acclaimed album Beverley Atonale and the lead single “Your Wagging Tail (Single Space).” Pitchfork gave it an 8.6, you know. Well, they actually didn’t, and that wasn’t the lead single, but you get what I mean. Apparently, they’re so niche that Beverley Atonale didn’t even get reviewed by Pitchfork. Who’s the poser now?

To me, that’s the mark of a fantastic band name/general aesthetic, because it’s a sign that they’re doing nothing but them. The Ladybug Transistor is another member of Elephant 6, and the influence is clear: like many of the other bands in their company, they were producing charming, ’60s-flavored indie pop. From my limited experience, they seem gentler and more slow-paced than some of their peers, but I love the atmosphere that “Rushes of Pure Spring” creates. Unlike a lot of other Elephant 6 bands, the ’60s comparison doesn’t jump out at me, but what does is another band from the ’90s—that being Luna. Aside from the fact that Gary Olson and Dean Wareham’s vocal styles are similar, it has that same gentle, observant quality to it; both the lyrics and the misty instrumentals sound like the results of a steady hour of journaling while staring out a window during a spring rain shower. My only complaint is that I found out about this song after I started taking the bus to school regularly, because this is prime bus commute music. There’s always tomorrow.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Monk and Robot – Becky Chambers – “Beverly Road brings/Rushes of pure spring/I hear the day sing/It’s alright…”

“Happiness” – Lisa Germano

If you’re coming into a Lisa Germano song called “Happiness” and expecting it to reflect any semblance of happiness…strap yourself in. Don’t say I told you so.

A lot of Lisa Germano’s songs have a childlike quality to them. It’s not in the sense of purity, but more in the sense of feeling like a nine-year-old hearing their parents fighting through the walls, learning some choice words, then misspelling them in their diary. There’s an almost-innocence to it, but it reflects a twisted mirror of childhood, a theme that recurs in a lot of her songs. (It’s especially evident in songs like “My Secret Reason,” whose plain lyrics paint images of rot through simplistic language: “But I know this/As dumb as I am/When I was young/And it was winter/In our yard/There used to be snow there.”) It’s a kind of reversion to lost childhood in adulthood, since that childhood wasn’t properly provided. A lot to unpack, to say the least.

“Happiness” has that same eerie simplicity to it. Germano intones the lyrics like she’s unenthusiastically regurgitating advice from a therapist: “Happiness/Is like TV/On or off/It’s up to me.” The subsequent ones are darkly childlike, with the sarcastic bent of a children’s songwriter with an acoustic guitar gathering everybody for a singalong: “Mom and dad/Are like my head/I won’t listen to them/Until they’re dead/Or I’m dead.” There’s a deliberate bit of gallows humor, a smirk evident when she sings “C’mon, everybody—sing!” and the next verse begins with “Pain and sadness/Are real to me.” (“Everybody!”) I wouldn’t go so far to say that “Happiness” is a funny song, but there’s a rotten sarcasm to it that only became more refined with time in Germano’s catalog. The chorus’s repetition of “Inconsiderate bitch, inconsiderate bitch,” sung in a similar singsong quality, is deeply wry and eerie, reflecting both the hollow platitudes people tend to give to suffering people (especially women) and the consequences of questioning them. Oh, you’re not just deciding to be happy? You’re not depressed! You’re just a selfish, inconsiderate bitch. Just turn on the happiness and be a docile, obedient woman, why don’tcha?

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Crane Husband – Kelly Barnhill – “Relationships
Are like a cow/Growing strong/Just for now/Poor little cow…”

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!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 6/14/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: in a concerning reversion to the summer of 2024, I’m excessively yapping about Cate Le Bon and Cocteau Twins in the same post again.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 6/14/26

“Pitch the Baby” – Cocteau Twins

Buckle up, folks, it’s Cocteau Twins summer…again.

Heaven or Las Vegas never gets old. Four years later, and I still haven’t recovered from the moment that I heard “Cherry-coloured Funk” in art class in high school. There was no turning back. But I did cave and grab it on vinyl, and it was about time I experienced the album again. Once more, there’s not a bad song on the album, but surprises surface with every listen. Lush is the best word that comes to mind with this album; over the course of their discography, Elizabeth Fraser and co. had been defining their niche of atmospheric, worlds-within-songs shrouded in mist and mystery. Blue Bell Knoll was the first step in making each song feel like a world, but Heaven or Las Vegas, to me, is where those worlds began blooming with lifeforms. Every distinguishable word that comes out of Fraser’s gibberish fog feels like you’re being let in on a secret. Each listen makes you feel a part of their world, like they’ve given you a ticket to their far-flung, alien planet.

“Pitch the Baby” is one of those songs where the glimpses of the comprehensible words feel like this. Despite what all the memes associated with this song, nobody’s going full fastball special on a baby, not to worry. In fact, it seems to be quite the opposite; though 99% of the lyrics are predictably murky, much of it appears to be addressed to Fraser’s then newborn baby: “I only want to love you/I’m so happy to get to care for you.” In spite of the turmoil leading up to this album’s release, Fraser claimed that her daughter being born gave her a sense of clarity, and that many of the tracks were “reputedly recorded…while holding Lucy-Belle in her arms.” Here, the circularity of “Pitch the Baby” feels like a cradle: it has this looping, dream-pop structure, but it’s always given me the feeling of something being shielded. It boasts some of Simon Raymonde’s funkiest, most iconic basslines, and the rapid bloop-bloop-bloop of the synths form Saturn rings around the track. It’s tantalizingly easy to lose yourself in, but in the end, the contained world it brings to life feels less like a song and more like a selfless act of love.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Under the Earth, Over the Sky – Emily McCosh – “I only want to love you/I’m so happy to get to care for you…”

“Remembering Me” – Cate Le Bon

I keep gushing about Pompeii over and over again, but somehow I’ve barely touched on the aesthetics of the album! It’s so distinct and very Cate Le Bon—I love all of the imagery of statues and the emphasis on static poses (evoking the sort of frozen visions of past selves that becomes one of the album’s main themes), but the neon, avant-garde makeup and costumes too. I forgot how much I loved the music video for “Remembering Me,” which stands on its own well, but…if those opening shots aren’t a tribute to David Bowie’s “Life On Mars?” music video, then I don’t know what is. (If you need more evidence to support this, I suggest Reward‘s touching closing track, “Meet the Man.”)

I’m kind of baffled to this day that the second half of Pompeii didn’t hit me as much as the first, because “Remembering Me” hasn’t gotten out of my head since. I think on the first listen, it felt like it leaned too much into the ’80s pastiche. I think I was, once again, too wrapped up in “Dirt on the Bed” and such to really absorb this song. Now, it stands out to me as one of the more emotional tracks. Behind the catchy, weirdo synth-pop curtain is a story about stories—more specifically, the ones we tell ourselves. The more I listen, the more it feels like the scene in Barbie where Margot Robbie blurts out “Do you guys ever think about dying?” in the middle of a glitzy, sparkling party. Le Bon called it “a neurotic diary entry that questions notions of legacy and warped sentimentalism in the desperate need to self-mythologise“; for Le Bon, who had to face all of this while returning to her childhood home during the pandemic, it became a tug-of-war between the self that she was and the self that she wanted to be perceived as: “In the remake of my life/I moved in straight lines/My hair was beautiful.” The verses confidently strut, catwalk-like, as the pedestaled, false version of herself—stronger, more confident, more beautiful—before the chorus tears everything down. You can’t get any more candid about this than “Facedown in heirlooms.” Whew.

The rest of “Remembering Me” is full of just as many sucker punch lyrics: “I wore the heat like/A hundred birthday cakes/Under one sun/I didn’t need anyone/On my own luck/I arrived just to seat the choir/And bowled them over.” It’s the kind of vulnerability that gets more impactful with each listen—I’ve certainly gotten into those places where I’ve been so determined to be confident and self-reliant that I worked myself into a corner, and only asked for help when things had bubbled up and exploded in my face. Like it or not, we’re all caught between that image of ourselves and our real self. But hell, if Cate Le Bon wrestled this too, then maybe there’s hope for us too.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Calculating Stars – Mary Robinette Kowal – “I wore the heat like/A hundred birthday cakes/Under one sun/I didn’t need anyone/On my own luck…”

“Kingdom of Love” – The Soft Boys

“You’ve been laying eggs under my skin/Now they’re hatching out under my chin/Now there’s tiny insects showing through/And all them tiny insects look like you!”

I was nearly going to word this part somewhere along the lines of “there’s enough good Robyn Hitchcock lyrics to fill a book,” but then I remembered that there is such a book (It’s called Somewhere Apart, if you’re interested. I highly recommend it), and “Kingdom of Love” was included in it. Dammit.

I listened to an episode of Life of the Record about Underwater Moonlight last week, so for all the die-hard Hitchcock-heads out there, here’s almost an hour and a half of Robyn Hitchcock detailing the story behind the album in great—and often hilarious—detail. He often talks about the album as the product of him being a rather confused young man in the music industry, but if I could come up with anything as good as the lyrics I pasted above, I’d be set for life. Hitchcock words a lot of the love-adjacent songs on this album as being akin to demonic possession, which…I’m sure there’s a lot to unpack there, but we got some great songs about it. And you know what? I’ve been listening to this song over and over for weeks as I’ve been trying to play it on guitar, and if that’s not demonic possession, I don’t know what is. (That riff at the end of the chorus is burned at the back of my brain. Still a work in progress.) “Kingdom of Love” evokes the frenzied urgency of punk and pairs it with lyrics that recall a ’50s B-movie about alien invasion, all in service of this twisted, grotesque vision of falling head over heels. Hitchcock’s yowled declaration of “all I want to do is be your creature!” at the end of the bridge cements what makes Underwater Moonlight so wonderful: a distillation of the brash punk sound of the late ’70s, but with a weirdo slant that was all Hitchcock and co.

..AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Someone You Can Build a Nest In – John Wiswell – “You’ve been laying eggs under my skin/Now they’re hatching out under my chin/Now there’s tiny insects showing through/And all them tiny insects look like you!”


“Words” – Missing Persons

Unfortunately, you’ve all come to me in a very ’80s time in my life. I think I’ve come full circle back to where I was in elementary school, when most of my music taste consisted of Duran Duran, Erasure, and Madonna, owing to my mom. I never stopped liking all of those bands, but I think I just happened to be at the epicenter of Gen Z being oversaturated with highly-curated ’80s nostalgia…the impact (derogatory) of Stranger Things. But new wave is just that good though. At its best, new wave was such a sharply bold genre, with its sleek sound but alternative spirit. For a song like “Words,” a repeated exorcism of frustrations of repeatedly going unheard, it’s the perfect medium—how can you go unheard when you’ve got a voice like Dale Bozzio? Her theatrical vocal presence makes this entire song, belting, squeaking, and murmuring through the various stages of her anger. It’s all a perfect specimen of new wave, and no amount of time that passes will make it any less wonderfully catchy.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

I Am the Ghost In Your House – Mar Romasco-Moore –
“I might as well go up and talk to a wall/’Cause all the words are having no effect at all/It’s a funny thing, am I all alone?”

“The Wedding Song” – David Bowie

I…

…okay, I get dangerously emotional every time I think about how much David Bowie and Iman loved each other. And still do. Shit, I need a minute, I’m on my period…just trust me on this one.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Bowie’s Bookshelf: The Hundred Books that Changed David Bowie’s Life – John O’Connell – you’ve been fooled, this is just a book recommendation that’s just even more book recommendations…either way, there’s some greats in here, and a peek behind the curtain of one of the most literary-minded rockstars in history.

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!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs – 5/31/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

BEFORE I GET INTO IT: my longtime best friend has joined me in creating a book blog! It’s over on Wix, but it’s well worth migrating to another website to see her excellent book reviews. Go show Daisy’s Fables some love!!

This week: this one really feels like I’m a 12-year-old holding up my interests and talking at you about them, but that’s what blogs are for, right?

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 5/31/26

“Huey Newton” – St. Vincent

Sit down. I’m yapping about St. Vincent’s self-titled album again. You WILL listen. You subscribed to this blog, this is the price you pay…

I really haven’t changed since the age of 12, huh? It really makes pieces of my soul wither to see companies running with the joking “your inner child needs a little treat” expressions and turning the healing experience of becoming one with your inner child corporate. No, your inner child doesn’t need the new Starbucks drink, or whatever. That being said, preordering the 10th anniversary pressing of St. Vincent’s self-titled album was for me, but also my inner 12-year-old. As I sat there listening to it, I could feel her curled up inside of me like a chrysalis. I feel like I’m slowly becoming everything she wanted me to be.

But present me reveres St. Vincent as much as 12-year-old me did. Now that I’m older, it’s become one of those puzzle boxes of albums with new layers that reveal themselves every time you listen to it. (And that’s saying something, because I listened to it a concerning amount in middle school.) For me, this listen made me realize that this album is musically and thematically sound. There isn’t as much of a narrative to it as some of St. Vincent’s other albums, but throughout the many modern anxieties that she dishes out, there’s this through line of life being swallowed by the Internet; it’s meant to be more of a near-future thing, if her cult leader persona is anything to go by, but it rang true in 2014—and today. Clark wrote “Huey Newton” as a loose stream of consciousness song; the reference to the Black Panther Huey Newton is only relevant because of a vivid dream she’d had about him after taking a high dose of Ambien. For Clark, the lyrics are “tied to the next in a way that I don’t even understand…It has the feel of an extended Google search, and is set in the near future, after a long winter.” It is kind of a sonic doomscroll in the way that it pinballs from one disconnected image to the next. But you can see the intention of the artifice of the Internet that comes through in some of these images; “Fake knife, real catcher,” or “fuckless pawn sharks” evoke the ease of which people construct their identities even though there’s nothing behind the curtain. 12 years later, her image of a lawless internet populated by fakers and criminals has become even realer, with the blight of AI polluting what was already polluted in the first place. (For the record, I’m taking the line “Cowboys of Information” as the name for my purely hypothetical St. Vincent cover band.)

“Entombed in a shrine/Of zeroes and ones” remains one of the hardest lines on the album, if only in delivery alone. “Huey Newton” switches from a more restrained, dreamy piece of indie synth-pop before launching a salvo of guitar shrapnel in your face at the 2:37 mark. Every line is spit as her signature guitars dissolve into glitch-like fuzz. It all sounds distinctly pixelated, aggressive in its assault, as though the false veil of the digital world is being torn apart by a virus before your eyes. The beauty of St. Vincent to me is that the layers on “Huey Newton” are present on every song—everything has digitized tree rings hewn into it, every one revealing something about the vibrant tapestry of this album’s dystopian, digital world.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Machinehood – S.B. Divya – “Entombed in a shrine of zeros and ones, you know/You know/Oh, with fatherless features/You motherless creatures/You know…”

“Greta” – Cate Le Bon

Cate! Le Bon! Cannot! Make! A! Bad! Album!

Genuinely baffling how one person can be this talented. Sure, there are weaker spots in her catalogue, but I don’t think there’s such a thing as a bad Cate Le Bon song. I’ve just listened to CYRK, her second album, and it’s just as inventive as some of her later work, though quite different in sound. Before she crafted atmospheres from saxophones and synths, she had a more traditionally indie rock sound, but not without the unique lyrical and vocal touches that she’s always carried. CYRK as a whole is playful (fitting for an album named for the Polish word for “circus”), an adventurous branching-out into whatever struck Le Bon’s fancy. In spirit, it reminds me a lot of Björk’s early work, where she was just putting out feelers wherever she wanted, with only the intention to make daring music.

“Playful” doesn’t exactly describe “Greta” though. It’s one of the slower, more contemplative songs on the album; aside from the vaguely trumpet detour at the end, most of it relies on muted guitar and bass. For that reason, it came out of nowhere for me. What also came out of nowhere was how emotionally moving this track is; Le Bon softly sings of a subject with “eyes the size of lagoons/Dreaming wild” and whose baby days are “coiled up inside her like ribbons all tied.” It feels like she took a telescope and looked down at me as a child, my eyes turned skyward. There’s something about it that feels like a comforting lullaby, from the references to a child born in the stars to the slow rhythm, fit for gently rocking a cradle back and forth. It feels like an ode to every weird child who refused to let the weirdness get beaten out of them, no matter how hard the world tried. If I’d heard this as a kid, I feel like I would’ve found infinite solace in it, but now that I’m hearing it as an adult, it feels like a potent reminder to keep the child alive, to not let the ribbons of baby days get tangled or forgotten, and to remember that all of us are made of star stuff.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Beautyland – Marie-Helene Bertino – “Observatories clocked you in the stars/They were holding you so dear/Greta, be good to yourself/You’ve always been here.”

“I Might” – Wilco

The Whole Love does not get the love it deserves. Fully acknowledging that I have a fog of nostalgia surrounding my head whenever I talk about this album, this album is severely underrated. I think the problem with Wilco’s discography is that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is such an obvious, career-defining best that it overshadows so much of the adventurous work that they’ve made in the decades since. And if we’re talking about adventurous, then we need to talk about The Whole Love, an unexpected buffet of Wilco’s classic alt-rock sound and explorations out into both the electronic and folk worlds. “Art of Almost” and “Sunloathe” really shouldn’t be on the same album in theory, but The Whole Love makes it happen.

This album was the first Wilco release I remember being…well, conscious for. I was in elementary school when it came out; I specifically remember my dad playing the album all the way through while driving to work and watching the Popeye crossover music video for “Dawned On Me” at the old studio where I took piano lessons. So even before I went through the whole album on my own, I’d already listened to the whole thing. “I Might” was one of the many songs on the album that remained in a nameless limbo in my memory as A Wilco Song That Certainly Exists, but I couldn’t put it to a concrete song. It sounds like your average Wilco song from the 2010’s, with its driving rock sound and cheery organs, but even though it’s not as full-throttle weird as “Art of Almost” (which comes right before it on the album…talk about whiiiiplaaaaash), it has the spirit of “let’s try everything, what’s the worst that could happen?” Jeff Tweedy’s lyrics are nonsensical and free-association (“Your sno-cone/And it’s piss and blood,” anyone?) and the chorus of “You won’t set the kids on fire/Oh, but I might” is…wild, obviously, but the more I listen to it, the more it feels like it’s a defiant statement of turning his past work—and people’s expectations of the band—upside down and destroying them. The Whole Love came out of its ashes, and to me, it’s still one of the most daring albums in their catalogue.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Obake Code – Makana Yamamoto – “It’s in the cards, oh oh/’Get Well Soon – everybody’/Do all lies have a taste?/Let it go, I don’t know, oh…”

“Advice & Vices” – Chelsea Wolfe

I’d forgotten about “Advice & Vices” since…at least high school, around the time I had my Chelsea Wolfe awakening proper and listened to The Grime and the Glow, her first album. Hearing a song like this brings up so many contradictions—I love it, but I simultaneously feel like it’s slightly distant from the music she’d become known for, and yet it feels so innately Chelsea Wolfe. It’s always been goth, but it’s not cloaked in quite the same foreboding atmosphere as much of her later work. The album is much more lo-fi, and yet you can already see the seeds of her signature style germinating; “Advice & Vices” feels like a more understated indie rock song, until you hear Wolfe’s muted ghostlike howls recorded at the very end of the song. Her voice is already strong here, and it’d only get stronger. But it’s like watching Wolfe fish in a frozen lake for what would become her sound; the ice is melting, and around it is what would become the iconic artist that I love today. She was always that good.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The King Must Die – Kemi Ashing-Giwa – “I never listen to my own best advice, no/Like one thing leads to another/Like one heart bleeds for another/And everybody wants what they can’t have…”

“New Muscles” – mary in the junkyard

The cynical part of me is starting to think that mary in the junkyard (or their management) might’ve just been too good at picking singles. But the more optimistic part of me is starting to think that Role Model Hermit is going to be such a fun album. We’re at three singles now ahead of the album’s July release, and each one has been so different from the other—this is pretty much worlds apart from “Candelabra.” It’s also a very different song than I’ve expected from mary in the junkyard, and…I love it.

“New Muscles” is such an uplifting, confidence-boosting song. But from the more gloomy instrumentation, full of strings and percussion that sounds like somebody’s whacking a plastic bucket with a spoon, you wouldn’t think it. Yet it’s the perfect song for dusting yourself off and getting back on your feet. It’s all about emerging from a cocoon and embracing all of the possibilities of your new, stronger, and more healed self: “I’ve been getting up and getting out/Working out and working on myself/New muscles all over my back/New muscles all over my back.” It feels like the spiritual successor to Wilco’s “Kicking Television” in terms of empowering indie rock songs about self-improvement that totally avoid sounding corny. It has a playful element to it (“I will take you down with one finger”), but it balances the joking “they’ll never see the new me coming” attitude with a genuine, sparkling hope for the wonderful things that’ll happen once you start exercising these new muscles and putting that healing self to work. “New Muscles” came out at a very advantageous time in my life—I’ve been feeling some version of this song for a while, what with trying to claw my way out of a multitude of bad habits and becoming more independent in my life. It really does feel like emerging from a chrysalis, even though I know that I’ll probably be emerging from a number of chrysalises over the course of my life. For now, I’m taking this new self to better places. Here’s to flexing your new muscles.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Juliet Takes a Breath – Gabby Rivera – “Courage in my bones/I embrace the thunder and the lightning/I will make it so hard to forget me…”

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!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (5/26/26) – The Killing Spell

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

As I’ve been doing my AAPI books focus during AAPI Heritage Month over the years, I noticed that I’ve unintentionally neglected the PI part of the acronym, which is a real shame. Unfortunately, as with a lot of marginalized groups, it’s difficult to find books—especially genre fiction—by marginalized authors; in fact, The Killing Spell is billed as the first traditionally published adult fantasy by a Native Hawaiian author, which…insert the “disappointed, but not surprised” meme. It took until 2026 for this to happen? Christ.

Anyways, I was intrigued by that, and by the urban fantasy premise. In the end, The Killing Spell was a fun and ambitious fantasy debut.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Killing Spell – Shay Kauwe

200 years ago, a flood of unforeseen proportions changed the world forever. The Hawaiian Islands were submerged in the ocean, and the survivors found refuge on the coast of California. Kea Petrova lives in this Hawaiian Homestead in what remains of Los Angeles, honing her language-based magic. Discriminated against by the powers that be—both because of her heritage and her magic—she tries to keep her head down. But when a powerful politician is murdered by a killing spell connected to the Hawaiian language, Kea has a target on her back. Desperate to prove her innocence, she teams up with a corrupt politician to clear her name. But what they’ll uncover may shake the magical world of L.A. to its very foundations…

TW/CW: murder, violence, sexual harassment, racism, colonialism/imperialism themes

The Killing Spell is a great debut, but what stands out about it is that I can just feel how much fun Shay Kauwe had while writing it. Though it wasn’t without its flaws, I could feel that same sense of fun and adventure on every page of this novel. I guarantee that you’ll have a blast reading it!

The characters in The Killing Spell are also a standout for sure. Kea was such a compelling main character; she has that perfect combination of being flawed enough to seem real but likable enough to root for. She’s headstrong and stubborn more often than not (to be fair, it’s justified half the time), but she’s so determined and witty that it almost makes up for it. She had the perfect combination of traits to make all of her adventures instantly worth following. The other characters were differing degrees of fun and campy, which suited the classic murder mystery atmosphere. The only character that I didn’t like as much was Sora. He was a little too cliched for my liking, and as much as I love a good enemies-to-lovers arc, Kea and Sora lacked romantic chemistry to me. The romance subplot was just forced in general—thinking back to the story as a whole, it really didn’t enhance anything about it. But he’s the exception to the rule—Shay Kauwe’s characters were a joy to follow.

Despite The Killing Spell being set 200 years in the future, it checked off all of the boxes for a fun murder mystery. I think I just like genre fiction-mystery/thriller melds in general—they just present so many fun opportunities to use worldbuilding to make a compelling world and explain the structures of it by showing you what it means for things to go wrong. There’s so much here for the diehard fantasy fans, but I think if you’re a mystery reader who wants to get into fantasy, you should absolutely pick up The Killing Spell. The setting is modern enough for a lot of the classic murder mystery beats to happen, and with the right balance of seriousness and camp; you’ve got your mysterious poisonings, unlikely detective teams, and seducing people for clues in a dance hall, all wrapped up in a futuristic fantasy package. What was clear to me was that The Killing Spell was Kauwe’s love letter to both genres, and that passion was evident with every successive page.

Language-based magic was already a fascinating magic system for Shay Kauwe to explore, but it bolsters the novel’s themes, which were one of The Killing Spell‘s biggest strengths. Many of the characters (most prominently Kea) are Native Hawaiian, and there is so much discussion about sovereignty and land ownership, as well as the preservation of Indigenous cultures. But I think the language magic and the discussions of the “legitimacy” of languages was the strongest theme in the novel. Through this magic system, Kauwe starts some very cogent discussions about what languages that people and governments deems “important” in its often Eurocentric view, and the bias against languages that don’t have as many speakers; there’s also lots of very potent discussions about cultural pride and how it can be an act of resistance when the dominant, hegemonic cultures are bent on deeming it “lesser.” Kauwe’s pride in Native Hawaiian culture shone through in The Killing Spell, and from an outside perspective, I think these kinds of perspectives are so vital to fantasy as a genre.

Most of the elements above would’ve added up to a solid four stars for me. I had some minor nitpicks, but most of them aren’t very relevant. What is relevant, however, is the worldbuilding, which left a lot to be desired. Aside from the language-based magic, which was well-thought out and thematically strong, the worldbuilding got messy. The whole impetus for the emergence of magic was this cataclysmic flood, which somehow released this language magic into the world. How this happened just…isn’t explained. At all. There was a flood, the Hawaiian Islands sunk, and…magic appeared? I guess? And The Killing Spell happens 200 years after said flood. You’d think that there would be some sort of major societal change, right? Other than the vague system of magical mobs that rule L.A., we get no explanation as to how the world reorganized itself or how magic changed society at large. This is supposed to be 200 years in the future, but nothing would’ve changed if this was just an urban fantasy set today. Other than the Hawaiian Homestead plot, we don’t get any real consequences of how the world changed after the flood. And locations outside of America get mentioned, but what the hell happened to them? Come to think of it, what’s going on in America outside of L.A.? Ultimately, the foundation was there, but Kauwe didn’t expand on it nearly enough for the worldbuilding to actually hold water.

All in all, an action-packed debut rife with magic, mystery, and intrigue. 3.75 stars!

The Killing Spell is Shay Kauwe’s debut novel, and a standalone.

Today’s song:

ANOTHER BANGER CATE LE BON ALBUM IN THE BOOKS! cyrk is excellent, and this song makes me emotional out of nowhere…

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 5/24/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: inventive covers, timeless anthems, and some classic quirked-up white boy music.

Enjoy this week’s review!

SUNDAY SONGS: 5/24/26

“A Mistake” – Fiona Apple

If we live long enough under the patriarchy, most of us women have the urge to permanently destroy something at least once in their lives. Once is generous, honestly…have you read the news lately? For Fiona Apple, who had been heavily scrutinized under the public eye and lambasted by music critics in the years leading up to When the Pawn…, the urge must’ve been constant. That’s why “A Mistake” feels so genuine. It’s a slinky, trip-hoppy track about breaking free of society’s expectation of a “good girl” and deliberately wrecking things, fully cognizant of the consequences but not caring in the slightest: “And when the day is done and I look back/And the fact is I had fun/Fumbling around/All the advice I shunned, and I ran/Where they told me not to run/But I sure had fun.” No matter if you act on it, Apple taps into that universal urge to raise hell after being boxed in and stymied by expectations of femininity (“I wanna make a mistake/Why can’t I make a mistake?”), societal control, and an urge to just rebel, even if you don’t know what against. And then there’s the element of deliberately going against good advice—Apple’s trail of destruction, by her own admission, isn’t entirely justified, but there’s that constant, biting urge to defy well-meaning advice anyway. After all, “And if you wanna make sense/Whatcha lookin’ at me for?/I’m no good at math.” It’s all wrapped up in a complex package, not always thoughtful, but from a messy, nonsensical place of rage with nowhere to go. Screeching guitars that give the effect of buzzing insects and a luscious synth loop to back it all up, creating a fully-fledged ode to giving into your most reckless urges.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Gideon the Ninth – Tamsyn Muir – “So I’m gonna fuck it up again/I’m gonna do another detour/Unpave my path/And if you wanna make sense/Whatcha lookin’ at me for?/I’m no good at math…”

“Crosseyed and Painless” – Talking Heads

This might be the moment where I finally, finally get into Talking Heads. My brother recently listened to Remain In Light and introduced me to a handful of songs from it; apparently, he’d also fully Mandela-effected the idea that I owned a Remain In Light t-shirt, so maybe I should just listen to it. So much has been said about the album: the fusion of rock, funk, and early hip-hop, the influence of Afrobeats, the early electronic instrumentals. And all of that’s there. But you know what strikes me immediately?

Brian Eno. This just reeks of Eno. I mean, he obviously produced this album, but his rhythmic influence is so clear. “No One Receiving,” one of my favorite songs of his, is very Talking Heads, and he’d worked with the band on several albums at that point. But the frantic, anxious rhythms of “Crosseyed and Painless” and the chirping electronics are so Brian Eno. (He also provides backing vocals on the chorus, and Byrne’s certainly got some “King’s Lead Hat” in the delivery.) Maybe I just love it because of the Eno by proxy. But I feel like that would be a disservice to David Byrne and co., whose unique touch seems to have made Remain In Light so iconic. First off—oh my God, Tina Weymouth’s bass playing is nothing short of phenomenal. Once she finds the groove, she grabs ahold and never lets go. I think Byrne is what separates this from Eno in the end—though they share the same kind of angular energy, Byrne’s seamless shifts between desperate crooning in the chorus to frantic, anxious proto-rapping in the bridge: “Facts all come with points of view/Facts don’t do what I want them to/Facts just twist the truth around/Facts are living with their insides out.” That’s just nothing but David Byrne, as is this song’s spirit, in the end. Eno bolstered it, but the sweaty-palmed sprint through a state of alienation is nothing but Talking Heads.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Volatile Memory – Seth Haddon – “Nothing there/No information left of any kind/Lifting my head/Looking for the danger signs…”

“Modern Girl” – Sleater-Kinney

I hate to say it, but the strongest memory I have of hearing “Modern Girl” was hearing Sleater-Kinney play it live while co-headlining with Wilco about five years back. They did the classic “this is our big song, sing it with us!” thing and tried to get the crowd to sing the chorus…and only a handful of people did. Yeesh. Probably some of the largest-scale secondhand embarrassment I’ve ever felt. But they’re plenty successful, well-known, and presumably happy with their lives, so I can’t imagine that one (1) crowd in Colorado not singing along with them made much of a dent on their egos.

Nonetheless, “Modern Girl” is one of the songs I took away from that setlist all the way back in 2021. Despite the painful mix on the version I have (once it gets loud, it gets crunchier than a bass-boosted meme from 2018…somebody remaster this already, Jesus 😭), it has the same staying power. It’s an anthemic, gradually building story of mounting emptiness; every verse, happily sung until bitterly screamed, scrambles for meaning in a world of artifice. There’s a void (a donut hole, if you will) at the heart of “Modern Girl” that fruitlessly gets filled by consumerism, mass media, and hollow love. It’s a sort of universal story of filling the hole in your life with all the plastic that TV advertises, only to find that “My whole life/Looks like a picture of a sunny day”—beautiful on the surface, but really just a flimsy piece of film in the end. Where you end up is sprawled out, floundering in the drowning tide of distortion that gradually swallows Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker’s riffs and harmonicas. Sometimes, all you can do when faced with the emptiness at the heart of your life is shout at it—and shout Sleater-Kinney does.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

On Earth As It Is on Television – Emily Jane – “My baby loves me/I’m so angry/Anger makes me a modern girl/Took my money/I couldn’t buy nothin’/I’m sick of this brave new world…”

“Company In My Back” (Wilco cover) – Cate Le Bon

Somehow, while spreading the gospel of Cate Le Bon to my family, I completely missed this cover, which my brother thankfully found. Wilco Covered, a limited-edition album only available on CD (and another big thank you to my dad for digging it up on eBay), was a real mixed bag, but this cover is a staggeringly good fit for both Le Bon and Wilco. “Company In My Back” comes from A Ghost Is Born, and Jeff Tweedy’s signature lyricism was already at some of its delightfully weirdest; “I attack with love/Pure bug beauty/Curl my lips and crawl up to you” is still one of the more memorable Wilco openings if we’re going by lyrics alone. Add in the wording of the chorus (“Holy shit/There’s a company in my back”) and some dulcimer, and you’ve got one of the more left field early Wilco songs out there. The original’s clattering percussion, like bug’s legs against tile, are equally so. It’s natural that Le Bon covered it, given her weirdo proclivities. Her moody lilt and agitated instrumentals fit in so naturally in her interpretation of this song. (I especially love the way she sings “They are hissing radiator tunes.” Pure magic.) This was recorded in 2019, and Reward has its footprints all over it, with blasts of saxophone to replace the acoustic guitars of the guitar. It’s such an excellent tribute, turning “Company In My Back” almost inside out while lovingly preserving the offbeat-ness of the original without sacrificing her own artistry.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Half-Built Garden – Ruthanna Emrys – “You learn so slow, old radiant beauty/I’ll curve my flight…”

“I Wanna Be Adored” (Stone Roses cover) – King Woman

What makes a cover good to me is when it captures the song’s spirit; like I just talked about with Cate Le Bon’s take on “Company In My Back,” it messes around with the instrumentals but retains Jeff Tweedy’s soul beneath it. Though King Woman’s take on “I Wanna Be Adored” doesn’t reach those heights (and how could it, with the original basically defining a good portion of the alternative/indie rock sound of the ’90s?), I think it succeeds in the same way. While the Stone Roses’ original dips into a dreamy haze, King Woman’s cover basically sounds like Stone Roses by way of Chelsea Wolfe. It’s longer and more drawn-out, with sludgy guitars and a thick, foggy echo clouding everything. Kristina Esfandiari shouts the iconic chorus as though into the mouth of a canyon, pleading into a cold void, a stark contrast to the speed at which it’s sung in the original. It’s an exciting take on this song—one that clearly melds King Woman’s style into the original’s beating heart.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Redsight – Meredith Mooring – the sludgy, doomy atmosphere of this cover absolutely fits with this tale of dark magic in space.

BONUS: In addition to Programmes for Cools, Jim Noir has just released The DLC Tapes exclusively on Patreon—or you can buy it on his KoFi! It’s another album of polished releases from previous EPs and outtakes. Here’s the reworking of “Scene 2”:

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!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (5/5/26) – Saltcrop

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

GUESS WHO’S BACK…WITH A BACHELOR’S DEGREE! 🎓 YIPPEE!! Either way, I’ll be back to my normal posting schedule for the foreseeable future, as I’m now done with finals and all of my graduation festivities.

I’ve been a fan of Yume Kitasei since her debut, The Deep Sky. Her second novel, The Stardust Grail, was a 5-star read for me—it’s truly a gem, if you haven’t read it already. (After re-reading it last month, I’m firmly convinced that we need another book set in that universe. Her worldbuilding was so expansive!! It needs a companion novel!! Please!!) So I was ecstatic to hear that she was writing another sci-fi novel. It seems she’s been jumping between all kinds of sci-fi subgenres: a literary thriller with The Deep Sky, space opera with The Stardust Grail, and now dystopia with Saltcrop. And though it didn’t blow me away like The Stardust Grail did, Saltcrop is still a worthy, timely testament to Kitasei’s talents.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Saltcrop – Yume Kitasei

In a world ravaged by climate change, the three Shimizu sisters–Nora, Carmen, and Skipper—eke out a living with their aging grandmother. But Nora has been missing for months without an explanation. Carmen has faith that Nora will turn up soon, but Skipper suspects foul play. The sisters voyage out into uncertain waters to find Nora, but when they stumble into an intricate conspiracy that’s more than they bargained for, they must decide whether the journey was worth it at all—and if Nora is even out there in the first place.

TW/CW: medical content, body horror, death of parents, abuse, violence, murder, illness, animal death, chronic illness themes

One of the coolest things about watching Yume Kitasei’s career expand, from a reader’s perspective, is her willingness to try almost anything within the sci-fi genre. Her first novel was a more literary, sci-fi thriller; her second, a daring space opera with influences from Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Saltcrop is wholly different than both of them, and perhaps the greatest thing about it is that Kitasei never seems to run out of ideas, and that she’s unafraid to chase them.

Saltcrop is full of heart, and to me, that was its main strength. What formed this heart was the central relationship between Skipper, Carmen, and Nora. Even though 1/3 sisters was notably missing for 2/3rds of the novel, her presence was palpable; all that was possible due to the subtle interactions that Kitasei wove through Skipper and Carmen, both past and present. Their clashing but united dynamic as sisters propelled the novel in such a poignant way. Though you know from the start that Skipper and Carmen would cross the ocean for their sister (and they do), Kitasei never falters in giving you the sense of the complex but steadfast love that they have for each other. It feels like a middle finger to all of the dystopian media that posits that the apocalypse will somehow deteriorate our inherently human urge to love and help each other. Siblings will be siblings, even when climate change floods the world—Kitasei means that in every sense possible.

The setting of Saltcrop is familiar: a flooded dystopian world rendered unrecognizable by climate change, where the poor eke out a hardened existence while the rich continue to get richer. It’s a plot we’ve heard many times before, but Kitasei’s touch made it much more human. Aside from the exploration of the sisters’s relationships, I think what made Saltcrop’s plot and worldbuilding so memorable were the vignettes that made it human. Kitasei’s flooded world was peppered with stories of ordinary people, dead and alive, who made a living in spite of nearly inhospitable circumstances. It doesn’t shy away from the dark and ugly parts of this world (namely the spread of illness and corporate greed) Combine that with the clearly exhaustive research she did about agriculture, epidemiology, and genetic modification that got especially relevant in the last half of the novel, and Saltcrop was one of the most lived-in dystopias that I’ve read in quite some time.

I said earlier that Saltcrop is fairly different from her previous two novels, but in terms of writing, I think it trends closer to The Deep Sky, which is to say that it leans more into the literary side of her prose. And if there’s anybody I trust with more literary prose, it’s Kitasei. Her eye for poignant, needle-sharp descriptions that lodge themselves into your heart is stronger than ever—there are casual gut-punches laid about everywhere. Even in the heart of a climate-ravaged dystopia, there were almost Fargo-like interludes where reality and memory warp, which was all the more potent considering the themes of remembrance in Saltcrop. (The bear scene in the middle especially comes to mind.) Like the plot, Kitasei’s prose turned an environment that we’ve seen many times before into something wholly fresh and enlivened.

I’ll admit, I have some mixed feelings about the ending. On the one hand, I loved how the sisters rallied together to try and bring down the antagonist corporation, which routinely swallowed all of their attempts at resisting; the gradual, quiet victory was hopeful, and felt realistic to the long and rocky road to justice that we see with these kinds of issues. However, I feel like there were so many unanswered questions at the end; without spoiling anything, it felt like the setup to another novel, but there was so much left unsolved and unsaid, and yet Kitasei gave it the tone of a bittersweet ending, but a concrete ending all the same. It only felt wrapped up in the sense of the corporation plot, but beyond that, it felt unfinished. I’m all for an ambiguous ending, but with such a key piece of the puzzle missing, it didn’t feel satisfying in the slightest.

All in all, a startlingly human post-apocalyptic story of sisterhood and survival. 4 stars!

Saltcrop is a standalone, but Yume Kitasei is also the author of The Deep Sky and The Stardust Grail.

Today’s song:

genuinely criminal that this isn’t available on streaming, but this is, hands down, one of the best Wilco covers out there

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 2/22/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles!

This week: even though I mention both Water Moon and Underwater Moonlight in this post, they’re somehow not paired together…sorry. Plus, songs about grief, love, and illegally keeping wild animals in your apartment.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 2/22/26

“The Man Who Stole a Leopard” – Duran Duran

I didn’t expect to be putting such critical Madeline Todd lore here on the blog, but it was recently dredged up from the annals of my mind after not thinking about it for, at minimum, a decade. So here you are.

I’ve been something of a Durannie from a young age. Second-generation Durannie on my mother’s side, if you will. My mom was at the critical point of fandom for Duran Duran, being a tween (and then a teen) in their heyday, and from an early age, she passed down that love to me. I have lots of fond memories of watching their music videos from a DVD on our old TV, along with listening to their CDs while we played with Barbies, some of which my mom had passed down to me as well. That brings us to All You Need Is Now, which came out when I was in elementary school; a lot of the tracks have heaps of nostalgia attached to them, including “The Man Who Stole a Leopard,” which I loved at the time. Fast forward a few years, and I now had my own iPod nano that I could listen to music with at night. “The Man Who Stole a Leopard” made its way onto the first playlist that my dad lovingly made. But at night, this song transformed into something that scared the shit out of me. Specifically, the violin sample beginning at 5:52. “Scared the shit out of me” is an adequate description, but what might be more accurate is that it gave me the absolute willies. My heebies were jeebied, dude. Something about the mild distortion of the violins, under cover of darkness, sounded so fundamentally wrong to my 10-year-old mind, huddled under blankets. Thankfully, I got my dad to remove the song from the playlist, and the nightmare ended.

Naturally, this was a very pleasant thing to remember when I woke up at 4 am a few weeks back. But when I revisited “The Man Who Stole a Leopard,” I found that my memory had completely distorted my perception of that violin sample that freaked me out all those years ago. Admittedly, I get a kind of knee-jerk sense of dread in the lead up to it, but I was pleasantly surprised that it sound completely innocuous to me—a little distorted and reverby, but just a handful of fuzzy chords to give a flourish to the outro. I’m now hovering where I was in the pre-iPod era, when I was allured by this song. Despite what the fabricated (yes, FABRICATED, I’ve been living a lie since 2011) news broadcast might lead you to believe, this tale of the man who stole a leopard and kept it in his apartment is entirely fictional. (Granted, some of the wording in the broadcast clues me in to the fictionality of it now, but it’s still fairly convincing, especially considering that they got the real newscaster Nina Hossain to record it.) What stands out to me about this track, along with most of the tracks I fondly remember from All You Need Is Now, is that there’s hardly a sense of Duran Duran trying to put their youthful, ’80s glory days in amber and imitate it. Sure, there’s a very “Hungry Like the Wolf” sensibility to the subject matter, but its prolonged runtime (6:15) and more eery atmosphere better fits their earliest albums, before they became perennial pop icons of the ’80s. Like a prowling cat, it’s a drawn-out, seductive crawl through a tale of toxic seduction and love that isolates you from all else. But from all of these memories, there’s one crucial lesson I have to take from this: things tend to sound a lot more sinister when you’re in the dark. Shed some light on it, and this track—like so many other things—will lose the fangs you thought they had. What a relief it is to not be 10 anymore. I love this song.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Open Throat – Henry Hoke – I think there’s enough overlap between a big cat being inside human houses and almost being domesticated to bridge the gap between a leopard and a mountain lion. Literary fiction isn’t always my favorite, but this was an excellent read.

“Queen of Eyes” – The Soft Boys

At its worst, a lot of punk music and culture became a caricature of itself; There was such a dogged determination to “sticking it to the man” that, in declaring that they were different from the mainstream, they created a different kind of conformity in sound and style. If you’re not exactly like x, y, or z, you weren’t punk. As insufferable as that is in retrospect (and today, presumably, though I don’t keep up with a lot of modern punk), it did breed a veritable garden of absolute weirdos who weren’t punk enough in a myriad of ways—bands like XTC and The Soft Boys, whose quirky members adhered in some ways to punk’s musical style, but were too sincere—and literary-minded—for punk, because punks don’t write about statues who come alive and wander out to sea. I’ve definitely been influenced by some aspects of punk bands and aesthetics over the years, especially when I started becoming more aware of politics; however, I feel like the bands I identify more with are the ones that were a little too soft, melodic, or just authentic enough for punk. And I think that’s where my expression falls too—I’ve always identified, in terms of my makeup and my clothes and my politics and my music, with “alt,” just because it’s an umbrella term for anyone who falls outside of those strictly-defined, often social media-enforced lines in the sand between one aesthetic from another. My music taste was bound to fall here eventually.

I’d loved about half of Underwater Moonlight ever since I saw Robyn Hitchcock for the first time, but now that I’ve started collecting vinyl, I picked up a copy of the album when I saw him again at the beginning of the month—AND GOT IT SIGNED BY THE MAN HIMSELF!! I’m still in shock, honestly, so on the off chance that you’re reading this, Mr. Hitchcock—thanks again. It’s been in the background of my life consistently for the past month, and I can’t think of any downsides, other than my neighbors hearing the lyrics of “Old Pervert” through the walls. (Look, it’s not my fault that they made a song called “Old Pervert” but also made it an indisputable banger.) I was agonizing over which song to include here, since they’ve all more or less been on a loop in my brain, but “Queen of Eyes” stuck out to me, probably the sunniest inclusion on the record, especially on the heels of the jagged, leering stylings of “Old Pervert.” Even this early on, Hitchcock was nothing but himself: his half-nonsensical, half sweetly sincere and lovesick lyrics are wrapped in a wallpaper collaged from the psychedelic Beatles, Syd Barrett, and something that could have only come from his brain and his alone. Bright, jangly, and infectiously catchy, it embodies this line from the booklet that came from my record booklet, written by David Fricke: “the Soft Boys dared to ask: did punk rock and the end of the 1970s…also have to mean the end of joy, literacy, and bright voices?” That torch remains the same one that Hitchcock has carried for the rest of his prolific career. What struck me while listening to Underwater Moonlight is that this same spirit has always been there—his sprightly musical vitality has only brightened since his early forays into music.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Song of Salvation – Alechia Dow – “Here I am again, it’s no surprise/Locked in orbit ’round the queen of eyes…”

“Sienna” – The Marías

Expect a lot more about The Marías in the coming weeks—they’ve been a very calm anchor in the chaos of…well, everything in my life. I’ve spent the past week digging more into their music, but this song was one of the first I discovered, in no small part because it was the soundtrack to a recent art trend that went around Instagram and TikTok. (The one I linked is from @zaiciart on Instagram, who has such a wonderful style!) From what I’ve heard of the album, Submarine really was the best possible name—every song feels like it’s been submerged, crafted from trails of bubbles and that special kind of whispery echo that happens to your voice when you’re trying to talk to your friends in the pool. María Zardoya has such a uniquely ethereal voice, so much so that it was genuinely jarring to hear her normal, lower speaking voice on their (excellent) Tiny Desk concert. “Sienna” is a wistful track, but one that only really harpoons you in the gut out of nowhere once you look into the lyrics—the backdrop is the fallout of Zardoya’s previous relationship, but specifically mourning the baby she imagined having with her partner: “she would have done all these things like us. But because we broke up, Sienna will never exist,” Zardoya said about the origin of the track. The track’s ghostly qualities crystallizes once you know that meaning—this entire future that Zardoya imagined is nothing but mist now; it’s fitting that, as this future fades away, so does the song, and Submarine as a whole—”Sienna” is the last breath before the album closes, an exhale of resignation before Zardoya’s wishes become ephemeral.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Water Moon – Samantha Sotto Yambao – “And I smile when I think of all the times we had/On the beach in the winter, when the waves were mad/Down by the water, crystal clear/See her face in the forest, then it disappears…”

“Cuckoo Through the Walls” – Cate Le Bon

Sunday Songs has basically become one of those Scooby-Doo villain reveal scenes. You rip off the “Sunday Songs” mask, and it’s just a weekly excuse for me to blabber on about Cate Le Bon. You fools all fell for my trap!

Did Cate Le Bon just casually come out of the womb with years’ worth of fully-formed talent? I still have two albums of hers that I haven’t listened to, but I swear that she’s incapable of making a bad album. Mug Museum feels a lot more like a standard indie rock album than her more recent works, but even the more (marginally) accessible style couldn’t keep her from her quirky engine firing on all cylinders. Moments of somber contemplation (“Mug Museum”) are hand in hand with ragged rage (“Wild”), and yet all form the weave of Le Bon’s experiences surrounding the album. Most of it deals with the death of her grandmother and how Le Bon processed her sudden absence from the matrilineal line; for her, it was less about what her grandmother meant to her as an individual and more about how her family rearranged and shifted in wake of her absence. The titular Mug Museum is a kind of haunted house of sorts where memories live: she called it “an imaginary place where relationships are looked at and thought upon.” Walking through this album does feel like strolling through a museum built inside of someone’s old house; small objects hold centuries of memories, and every strand on a curtain or crack in a window holds a deep history. “Cuckoo Through The Walls” is one of the tracks that I felt exemplified this feeling the best. Its more restrained, steady pace feels like tentatively peering through all the corners of said aging, dusty house, glancing at the light illuminating unseen gaps in the floorboards. Le Bon describes a state where these memories have anchored her to the house, to the point where she almost becomes the house itself: “And I watched the dinner drown/I drank for hours/Never leave the house/Cuckoo through the walls/Lay still on the ground/Exhale the sound of symphonies.” Like her signature, left-of-center takes on the most universal emotions, her grief doesn’t keen, but sinks into all the hollows of her mind and body—and that might be more of an honest depiction of it than most songwriters are willing to take.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Immeasurable Depth of You – Maria Ingrande Mora – “I will not sing your name/And tie my heart to Jupiter/And watermelon dreams/I felt the fear of change…”

“Au Pays du Cocaine” – Geese

Alright, you got me. The jury’s still out if Getting Killed is getting lobbed onto the mounting pile of albums I want to listen to, but “Au Pays du Cocaine” makes me understand a modicum of the hype. Sometimes an album invades your Instagram feed for no reason, but half the time, there’s at least something to it, even if that something boils down to only a song or two. This song just makes me feel…safe. Yes, it’s seems more to be about a relationship with someone who’s ruined their life, but it feels so safe to me. It sounds like the friends you give you a ride when it’s too far to walk, and the people who texted me and offered their showers when the hot water shut off in my apartment. It’s a hastily-built up lean-to to give you a fleeting moment of shelter in the rain. The middle ground between my feelings about “Au Pays du Cocaine” and the more literal lyrics is that it’s a promise: believing that people can change, and being ready for them when they do. I’ve learned the hard way that for some people, you just have to let them heal on their own terms, but that you by no means have to forgive them, or even be there for that healing. There’s a hard-won freedom in that realization. But this song is for the ones that are worth sticking around for—the people you love despite their faults. It’s rare to find those people worth sticking around for, but maybe that’s why I feel such solace in this song—those people are few and far between, but this song is for them.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet – Becky Chambers – “You can be free/You can be free and still come home/It’s alright/I’m alright…”

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!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 2/15/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: some of my favorite women in music getting unabashedly weird with it, the pioneering bisexuals of Britpop, and…crabs.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 2/15/26

“Wonderful” – Cate Le Bon

In her review of Crab Day for Pitchfork, Laura Snapes said this about the album’s inspiration (Cate Le Bon’s young niece replacing the mean-spirited pranks of April Fool’s Day for Crab Day, where you celebrate by drawing crabs): “nonsense is often the best response to nonsense, that the constructs we use to prop up our lives are often totally arbitrary.” Le Bon has had a deep sense of absurdity, but Crab Day as an album is built all about taking ordinary things in our life to task, but also about being faced with the fact that half of the things in our lives are arbitrary, flimsy constructs. Some of it’s done gleefully, as in the creation of Crab Day, but for others, it’s more emotional—“I Was Born on the Wrong Day” came out of Le Bon’s mother digging up her birth certificate and admitting that they’d had her birthday wrong for decades. Crab Day, both lyrically and musically, explores the pain that comes from realizing that our world is built on the flimsiest stilts imaginable, but also the glee that comes with spitting in the face of them and embracing life’s absurdity.

There’s always been quirkiness surrounding Le Bon’s music, but Crab Day feels like the moment that the eggshell split open and she fully embraced offbeat, unconstrained creativity. That’s not to say that any of her earlier work isn’t creative—quite the opposite, having just listened to Mug Museum—but this album is where her current sound began to coalesce in earnest. It’s much more guitar-oriented than her more recent works, but it’s got all of the hallmarks of what’s become her signature style: artful blares of saxophone, offbeat lyrics, and slanted melodies and rhythms that read like the audio version of a picture frame hanging at a crooked angle. “Wonderful” exemplifies that crookedness, easily the most unfettered moment of weirdness on the album. The guitars scream Lodger-era David Bowie, and the lyrics of mid-’70s Brian Eno. But the fact that seemingly every commenter in the YouTube comments section has an entirely different band comparison as to what it sounds like proves how original Le Bon’s unique arrangement of elements is. With everything from the xylophones to Le Bon’s vocals at a breakneck pace, it’s an ode to being constantly in motion: “I wanna be your motion-picture film, oh yeah/I wanna be your ten-pin ball, ball, ball.” In the context of the album’s crusade to expose life’s absurdity, it feels like a concentration of her spirit throughout this album, but also her career at large: to be adventurous in all sorts of ways, and to be constantly be searching for a new way of setting creativity and weirdness in motion.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Floating Hotel – Grace Curtis – it’s difficult to match a song as singular as this to a book, since it’s so distinct; but if anything, this would match the bustle of a Wes Anderson-esque hotel in space.

“Marigolds” – Kishi Bashi

Realizing that Kishi Bashi had written a song named after my favorite flower was already an exciting revelation, but finding out how engrossing of a song it is made that discovery all the better. Tinged with both joy and melancholy, “Marigolds” surrounds cross-generational experiences, and bridging the gap of realizing that everybody around you has a complex inner life, separated by time, but united in the here and now: “It’s the realization that another person’s perception of the world is just as real to them as yours is to you, and that this humility is the first step in living in harmony on a planet that is ultimately made up of 8 billion parallel universes.” With that emotional core to the track, the field of marigolds couldn’t be a more perfect metaphor—each bloom appearing similar on the outside, but each one having a unique, complex makeup that can’t be seen from the outside. His usual lush string arrangements are layered in a glimmering swarm evoking the delicateness of flower petals and the ephemeral wingbeats of songbirds. Paired with a gorgeously animated music video by Geoff Hopkinson, featuring marigolds that turn into fantastical, jellyfish-like beings, “Marigolds” is an utterly transportive track, scented with pollen and wistful longing.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Record of a Spaceborn Few – Becky Chambers – “I wish that I could grow up with you/I wanna see the world the way you do/I want to fall off the edge with you/I want to have fun with you…”

“Drink Deep” – Florence + The Machine

You guys, I’m sorry. Every time I hear a Florence + The Machine song, it’s described as some masterpiece that leaves permanent claw marks on your heart, and then I listen and I come back feeling…perfectly alright? I’m sure there’s something I’m missing, but some things just aren’t everybody’s cup of tea all the way. Objectively, Florence Welch has great vocal range, and I’ve never hated any song of hers, but I’ve also never thought to myself, “I need to listen to more Florence + The Machine.” Maybe part of it’s just that she’s been unfairly associated with the TikTokification of female rage (or, “female rage is when a woman sings loud and man is bad”) and “divine feminine” becoming a buzzword, but that’s not her fault at all. However, as I follow a lot of music publications online, I saw that Mark Bowen of IDLES was one of the producers on her latest album, Everybody Scream, so I was at least intrigued.

One of my dearest friends has been trying to convert me for quite some time (once again, SORRY), but I heard a snippet of this one, and I was hooked out of nowhere. It sounds almost nothing like any of her other songs I’ve heard. Again, Welch has a great voice, but I feel like a lot of her songs seem to rely on the strength of her voice in order to amp up the emotion, and the rest of the music doesn’t always follow. “Drink Deep” is more contemplative, but also, a lot eerier than I gave her credit for. Here, Welch translates her experience with her life passing her by as she’s touring (while everybody else moves about normally in their lives) as akin to being prisoner to the fae, trapped and ageless in their realm for hundreds of years while everyone else ages naturally: “What I thought was a night was a thousand years/What I thought was a sip was a thousand tears/But still, they said/Drink deep.” It devolves into a kind of Celtic-inspired folk horror where what Welch ends up essentially cannibalizing herself at the will of the fae—an apt metaphor for what the music industry puts its performers (especially women) through. The atmosphere of “Drink Deep,” with an ominous, thundering drumbeat, chimes, and a warbling choir reminiscent of Kate Bush’s “Rocket’s Tail,” evokes the passage into another, darker realm, a descent into an unbreakable deal made in blood.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Familiar – Leigh Bardugo – “They gave me gowns and riches/Cut gold thread with their teeth/Every night I went to see them/No, I did not sleep/And every cup they brought to me/Oh, you know I did/Drink deep…”

“Moon” – Björk

Every time I mention Biophilia, it’s inevitable that I go on and on about the app—which is appropriate, since it is the backbone of the album. But I feel like you’re missing an entire chunk of the album if you don’t talk about the delicately constructed visual language of it—for me, you’re missing half the story if you don’t see the elaborate costumes and the artistry of the visuals. All of the music videos for Biophilia are showstopping, and the music video for “Moon” feels like the best introduction to the album’s aesthetic. Literally, it’s a moving version of the album cover, but the superposition of the moon phases over Björk’s body visually convey the lyrics and the concepts behind them. I love the jagged, glowing constellation-shapes surrounding her, both a map of the app and of a galaxy itself; and I cannot get enough of Björk’s costumes for this album cycle. That combination of her rusty, Mars-orange wig and the metallic shades all throughout her bronzy dress and the playable harp corset, against the stark black of the backdrop, are just such a memorable, cosmic color combination to me. The blue ringing her face and eyes brings out the contrast spectacularly. This is the epitome of a wholly realized creative vision brought to life. Granted, this is much later in her career, but it gives me some hope that maybe, in some ideal timeline, some of the projects that I’m envisioning can someday can get as much of my creative freedom inside of them as possible.

The best way that I can describe “Moon” is that I feel as though I’m listening to a perfect circle. Set in 17/8 sign to mimic the phases of the moon, the chorus of harps seem to circle each other, an elaborate, delicate Ouroboros that encircles itself forevermore. It takes a. rare genius to make a song sound like a shape, but that’s exactly the kind of musician that Björk is. Her mind!! Her MIND!! Having a lighter, more celestial tone for a song about the moon, a subject that often invokes more ominous, sweeping majesty or loneliness (see: Radiohead’s “Sail to the Moon,” Bachelor’s “Moon”) makes it stand out from its many, many peers; the instrumentation is so pearly and dewy, and her line about “adrenaline pearls” makes me think of “Cocoon” in the sweetest way. And more poignant still is how she relates these lunar phases to the phases we cycle through in life—”Best way to start anew/Is to fail miserably/Fail at loving/And fail at giving/Fail at creating a flow/Then realign the whole.”

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Activation Degradation – Marina J. Lostetter – “As the lukewarm/Hands of the gods/Came down and gently/Picked my adrenalin pearls/They placed them in their mouths/And rinsed all the fear out…”

“The Drowners” – The London Suede

I think I just like 90% of Britpop. The only band in the genre that I’ve never liked is Oasis, and I’ve heard some argue that they’re not stylistically Britpop, but were just lumped into the genre because they blew up at the same time as bands like Blur and Pulp. I’m not sure if I can agree in good conscience just because I despise Oasis, but given what I’ve heard of them…it makes sense. Other than them, I’ve loved everything I’ve heard from the rest of the Big Four—and “The Drowners” is really convincing me that I need to listen to more of The London Suede.

At the forefront of every other explosive new subgenre, you will find a bisexual. The London Suede were one of the first bands to be called Britpop in earnest, and contributed a significant amount to its sound, although they were focused less on British social commentary and more on a dramatic, glam rock resurgence that recalled David Bowie’s storytelling and subversive sexuality and Morrissey’s literary-minded lyrics (and half-unbuttoned shirts). In their earlier days, they very much banked on the profitability and controversy of the queer imagery and lyrics in their band, as Bowie did back in the ’70s, from the lesbian couple on their self-titled album cover to Anderson’s obliquely queer lyrics and androgynous presentation. If he wasn’t bisexual, I’d honestly feel like it bordered on queerbaiting, relying on the shock value of subversive sexuality to make more money. But it’s not his fault, necessarily—God knows there’s legions of glam rock/metal artists from the ’70s and ’80s who glommed onto the queer aesthetics for the money it made them, and later disavowed queerness entirely. (Lookin’ at you, Alice Cooper.) Ultimately, The London Suede feel more like they’re indebted to English literary tradition to me—often queer, often subversive, and dramatically indulging in themes of class division and excess. That’s what Anderson and co. feels like to me, and “The Drowners,” with its cult of ambiguous sexuality, glamor, and wealth, feels like a worthy tribute.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Atlas Six – Olivie Blake – this brand of Britpop being big and dark academia being a major literary trend missing each other temporally is either a major blessing or a curse—they fit a little too well with each other.

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!