Fortuna – The Bookish Mutant

Sunday Songs: 8/17/25

Posted on August 17, 2025 by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: this semblance of a color scheme is hanging on for dear life, but I needed to talk about Biophilia IMMEDIATELY you must understand…

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 8/17/25

“Virus” – Björk

Another Björk album down! I was highly anticipating listening to Biophilia from the sheer conceptual layers of it; though the original app is now defunct, it still exists as a glittering piece of music and science education, reuniting our understanding of the sciences with the emotion that was always inherent to it. Whether it’s the structure of our genes (“Hollow”) to the phases of the moon (“Moon”), the ability Björk has to weave personal narratives of the rocky parts of healing with the natural processes of the world never ceases to astound me. Admittedly, Biophilia took me another listen around to fully get with it, but that’s mostly because being stuffy and lethargic from a nasty cold whilst the Amen break comes hurtling at you at 90 mph isn’t ideal. The artistry of…well, every single music video of the album never ceases to astound me. It would be easy for the concept to supersede the actual contents of Biophilia, but Björk never fails to pull the rug out from under me every single time. GOD.

“Virus” was one of the most delightful tracks from the album, so gentle, yet carrying a sinister undertone. Wreathed in tinkling chimes and gameleste, it uses a virus as a metaphor for a parasitic, one-sided relationship: “Like a virus needs a body/As soft tissue feeds on blood/Someday I’ll find you.” The virus motif sings sweetly, with Björk’s vocals as delicate and crystalline (no pun intended) as the icy instrumentals surrounding her, reminiscent of Vespertine. It makes itself indispensable (“Like a flame that seeks explosives/Like gunpowder needs a war”) as it sucks the life from its host, but never betrays its true intentions. Everything is hidden under the sweetness—as things tend to be in parasitic, codependent relationships, if we’re taking the more literal route with it. Even when she takes on the persona of a virus slowly killing a host, Björk’s vocals have never sounded more emotive and warm, only getting richer with age, something that time has proven since 2011. Though she uses that same voice to portray much more genuine and non-parasitic feelings throughout Biophilia, the beauty of her voice never ceases to entrance me, no matter the narrative delivery and what it’s hiding—which is exactly the point. It’s intoxicatingly sinister.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Someone You Can Build a Nest In – John Wiswell – “Like a mushroom on a tree trunk/As the protein transmutates/I knock on your skin/And I am in…”

“Bus Back to Richmond” – Lucy Dacus

Nearly five months after Forever Is a Feeling came out (and about a month after Lucy Dacus got a license to start marrying people onstage…what a queen), I’ve cooled down slightly from the initial disappointment, even if only a few degrees. I still hold that it’s her weakest and most commercial album, but at the end of the day, it’s a Lucy Dacus album, and knock on wood, I’ve never encountered a bad Lucy Dacus album. I’ve warmed up much more to “Bullseye,” but most of the other tracks I wasn’t a fan of on the first listen have remained the same for me.

But not long ago, Dacus released two extra tracks that were meant for Forever Is a Feeling but were ultimately cut from the album. REJOICE!! She said that “Bus Back to Richmond” didn’t fit with the rest of the album, but to me, replace some of the weaker tracks with this one, and the album would’ve been more memorable. Though it falls instrumentally into the more introspective, acoustic side of her discography, “Bus Back to Richmond” is a soft, wintry ramble through missed opportunities and sparkling promises of the future. Dacus’ poetically observational lyrics shine in this one, from her descriptions of the “watercolor fireworks” bursting on New Year’s Eve and “eight of us left to the floor and the bed/and the futon that sunk in the middle.” In Christmas light-dappled vignettes, she paints with startling tenderness the coalescing of a future romance, the moments that slowly merged together to form something gleaming in the not-too-distant distance. Even in the heat of August, it feels like a woolen blanket wrapped around you as you stare at the embers of a crackling fire—the perfect winter song for summer.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Whiteout – anthology – intertwining love stories that all converge in a record-breaking blizzard.

“Rabbit Run” – IDLES

New music from IDLES is always a welcome thing, but granted, it was quite disappointing that it was from the soundtrack for, of all things, Caught Stealing. I saw the trailer before seeing Superman (which was as wonderful as everybody has been saying it is. HOPE IS PUNK ROCK! I think Superman would love IDLES), and it basically just looked like a vague “punk rock” pastiche involving a slightly terrifying looking Matt Smith and a vague plot involving Austin Butler battling a bunch of ethnic stereotypes for…uh, reasons, I guess. Regrettably, the punk aesthetic fits with IDLES’ sound, and I hate to see them involved with something that looks so downright stupid, but…they do kind of fit the vibe.

“Rabbit Run” is one of four songs that will eventually appear on the soundtrack of Caught Stealing. Though it doesn’t seem to fall into the Arcane curse of “movie/TV soundtrack songs whose lyrics blatantly regurgitate whatever plot points they’re paired with,” it still feels restrained for IDLES; despite how cagey the lyrics are, it feels relatively free-flowing until the chorus kicks in. But the layers of Nigel Godrich-sounding production give it the perfect middle ground between slick and gritty, as do Joe Talbot’s vocals. The lyrics are certainly weaker than the typical IDLES far (“Beat you slow like your padre/Got you running like a jailbreak”), but when “Rabbit Run” hits the spot, it feels like the perfect score for high-octane chase scene, and a worthy display of Talbot’s vocal range.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Fortuna – Kristyn Merbeth – “Make way for collateral damage when I’m bored/Pick the scab on the arm of the beast til it’s ravaged when I’m bored/Oh so many things to do or not do when I’m bored…”

“Third Uncle” – Brian Eno

Today on “Madeline won’t shut the fuck up about Brian Eno,” we’re going back to the glammier days of the early ’70s. But in the case of this song, “glammier” feels like a misnomer, even though it’s placed both directly in the heyday of glam rock and Eno’s own heyday of his brand of glam rock. If it’s glam, it’s the zenith of uptight glam—it has the texture of touching guitar strings that are one wrong move away from snapping in half. It’s been wound up so severely that for all of nearly five minutes, it remains in the liminal space milliseconds before the tension breaks. With a thrumming bassline from Brian Turrington being the most freeform part of the song, every other part of “Third Uncle” is the music equivalent of squishing as many objects as possible into a box that will barely fit all of them—everything’s under the lid, but the seams are bulging. In the right mood, it’s energizing, and in the wrong mood, it’s borderline anxiety-inducing. To me, though, that’s proof that Eno’s rock experiment worked exactly as he calculated it: it’s an exercise in tension without release, only hints of freedom once the guitar swerves in one direction or the other. Even Eno’s nonsensical lyrics—a laundry list of items, some of which are burned—are uttered with the urgency of someone passing a secret code along through a burner phone.

Through this song, it’s easy to see just how much Eno’s influence spread. We mostly hear of Eno’s pioneering influence in the fields of glam rock, post-punk, and ambient music, but “Third Uncle” practically had a shockwave effect when it came to the early goth bands of the ’80s, starting in earnest after Bauhaus covered the track in 1982. It feels looser and less claustrophobic than the original, but it contains all of the trademark roughness around the edges carried over from Eno and into the grimier catacombs of what had just become goth. They achieve a balance of being hurriedly frantic (weirdly, I can hear the urgency of “It’s The End of the World As We Know It [And I Feel Fine]” in Peter Murphy’s vocal delivery) and yet mistier than looser than their forefather (or fore-uncle?), resulting in a rare cover that reinterprets the original way that somehow feels true to its original spirit.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The People Who Report More Stress – Alejandro Varela – a series of interconnected stories who are as tightly-wound as the instrumentals of this song.

“mangetout” – Wet Leg

“mangetout” starts at about 3:59 in this video, but the whole Tiny Desk Concert is worth a watch!

I’m late to writing about moisturizer in whole by about a month; for me, it’s not making my hypothetical 2025 best-of list, but god, it’s such a fun album! Wet Leg have gotten even more energetic with their sound, never quite pushing the boundaries of their previous musical landscape outwards all the way, but introducing enough novelty to it that it feels fresh. It’s a perfect summer album with its glistening production and shouted lyrics. And honestly, anyone who shoves Oasis out of the #1 spot on the charts has an immediate seal of approval from me. Somebody had to humble those clowns.

Even though I’d already had a preview of “mangetout” from their Tiny Desk Concert, released days before moisturizer came out, for me, it represents the melding of where Wet Leg once was and where they are today. The lyrics could’ve come straight out of their self-titled debut, and though, admittedly, they’ve written this song in some variation at least four times, they always manage to keep it fun, whether it’s with the gleefully shouted end of the song that snaps away just before devolving into chaos, or the blatantly obvious but still hilariously random inclusive of the name “Trevor” just to rhyme with “clever.” (It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.) Of course, I know maybe…ten words tops in French, so I fully just thought they’d mashed together “man get out” into a single word, but as one of the comments says on this Tiny Desk, “there was always going to be someone to be first on the moon, and there was always going to be someone to be first to realize that the French word for sugar peas was spelled ‘man, get out.'” If anyone was to be trusted to deliver this knowledge accordingly, it’s Wet Leg.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Not My Problem – Ciara Smyth – “You think I’m pretty cruel/You say I scare you?/I know, most people do/This is the real world, honey…”

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!

Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 3/3/24

Posted on March 3, 2024 by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: spring green for March, old dogs, and the consequences of the fact that at least 90% of my friends are gay and their music tastes rub off on me.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 3/3/24

“What Are We Gonna Do Now” – Indigo De Souza

This just in: the sad girl kool-aid has never left my system, and it likely never will. Buckle up.

“What Are We Gonna Do Now” lives squarely in the liminal space of uncertainty, as the title implies. It feels like the tense opening to a film; I could just be stuck on this imagery of the line “and we’re still on call with the nurses,” but I can’t help but imagine an opening shot panning out from the slow spikes of a heart monitor, slowly letting out beeps as Indigo De Souza’s voice gently drips like an IV with that lingering, trailing question: “what are we gonna do now?” Almost everything is gradual about this song, as if the verses were frozen in time: a picture of a person standing on the street while snowflakes suspended in midair decorate the space around them. De Souza’s voice dips and dives into nooks and crannies that only a cat could fit into, army-crawling through the shadows as she describes the wear and tear of a relationship in the middle of turmoil—not necessarily on the verge of a fracture, but in the middle of the storm that they aim to push through together. Exhaustion and frustration tinges it (De Souza’s delivery of “and I’m never cooking up what you’re craving” remains one of my favorite parts of the whole song), but it’s never the kind so intense that would throw their love out the window—it’s the determination of trying to find out exactly how to fix things, and scrabbling around, searching for answers in desperation. Like the ebb and flow of love, the instrumentals swerve from a near standstill to a rousing, guitar-driven chorus and back to quiet again, but after the first verse, nothing is the same; it has the same kind of barely-contained chaos of songs like Wilco’s “Via Chicago” and Mitski’s “The Deal,” with a sense that the anxiety of making amends and grasping for solutions. As De Souza’s airy voice rises like she’s gasping for air after emerging from the ocean, trembling drums and tambourines slip in and out of time, ever so slightly off-kilter and teetering, like one sneeze would send them all into disarray. Unlike the former two songs, though, it never fully gives in, but the unraveling is always at the back of the song’s mind, like an overflow of fearful thoughts as they try to pick up the pieces, but a sense of deep-breathing control as De Souza picks themselves back up.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

If Tomorrow Doesn’t Come – Jen St. Jude – one of the few apocalypse novels that really makes it a mission to focus on the human aspect.

“Lord Only Knows” – Beck

Full disclosure: I definitely ruined this album for myself. I knew it was going to be a good album, and it 100% is, but I’d already listened to about 3/4 of it, so there were no surprises left. All of the songs I remembered were already favorites, and the ones I hadn’t yet discovered weren’t as instantly classic as the others (sorry, “Derelict”). But that’s on me. Maybe on my parents for playing it so much in the car over the years, but mostly on me. Whoops.

That’s not to say that Odelay is a bad album at all—in fact, it’s quite the opposite. It makes me miss the old Beck, the one who didn’t scrub everything to an unnecessary polish, but instead made his music like a sculpture made from bits and bobs found in the junkyard—a bit of a tire here, an old, rusty car hood there, some nuts and bolts sprinkled on top for a finishing touch. It’s a collage, but not necessarily in the way that artists like De La Soul or The Beastie Boys make their collages: while their infinitely clever concoctions feel like they oil every sample into a unified organism of unlikely pieces, Beck’s method (for a while, at least) was to make every spare and found part stick out like sore thumbs, but so much so that all those sore thumbs eventually made a hand so absurd that it makes you think how does that even function as a hand? And yet it’s the perfect hand. There’s no other way that “Hotwax” would work without “I’m the enchanting wizard of rhythm.” In fact, the absurdity of all these samples make this mutant (no pun intended) record so memorable—nobody was doing it quite like Beck. Take this song, which starts out with a rasping scream, then descends into twangy and almost docile acoustic-guitar driven rock. It’s not the heat-waved calm that “Jack-Ass” (my favorite track on the album) exudes, but it’s got that same lazy drawl to it, every word curled at the edges like scraps of paper singed by a campfire. Odelay hadn’t yet reached critical mass of clever silliness that made ’90s-2000’s Beck so fun (that would be Midnite Vultures), but he had plenty of fun to spare—I always find myself laughing at the final lines that Beck sings as the track fades out like a car driving out of view, obscured by the wobbling lines of a heat wave: “Going back to Houston/Do the hot dog dance/Going back to Houston/To get me some pants.” You just can’t deliver the word “pants” with that much emphasis and have it not be funny. Them’s the rules. I apparently have the humor of a five-year-old, but evidently, so does Beck, and we’re all the better for it.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Fortuna (Nova Vita Protocol, #1) – Kristyn Merbeth – all of the same lazy, summer-eyed charm, but make it space opera (as things usually are on this blog).

“New Slang” – The Shins

Whenever I go to write about The Shins, I always end up going straight for the purple prose. It’s like the way I get with Radiohead, except they invoke something akin to religious fervor in me. I’m too far gone. But there’s something about James Mercer and his perpetually rotating cast of characters that evokes the lyrical side of my writing. Perhaps it’s that part of me connecting to that part of him, because he’s certainly got songwriting chops for days.

“New Slang” has been lingering in my life for decades; I faintly associate it with a period sometime in elementary or middle school. I think it may have been at the end of a playlist I listened to frequently. The Shins are never all that far from my mind, but this was the perfect song to shuffle out of the blue, soft and smiling like an old dog with white patches threaded into the fur of its snout. And I ran right up to pet that dog—god, I missed this song. Hello, old friend. Mercer has long since mastered the art of the old heartstring-tugging acoustic song, and while its as hipstery as it gets, there’s a calmness to it, a serenity like no other. And yet, for all intents and purposes, it’s James Mercer’s equivalent of a pop-punk “I’m getting out of this town” song; the lyrics were inspired by his experiences separating from Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the first iterations of The Shins had tried to take root. Disillusioned by a scene that he described as “macho, really heavy, and aggressive,” Mercer and company branched outwards, where their lyrical folk could have more meaning. “New Slang” was Mercer’s way of “flipping off the whole city,” as he described it (“Gold teeth and a curse for this town”), but there’s something beautiful in how quietly this song shoots its bitter middle finger. It’s not the jerky angst of separation that pop-punk lends to the subject, but instead the moment of looking back into the sunset, knowing that everything you’ve left behind is in the dust with the approaching night. Perhaps that’s where that serenity I feel comes from—the serenity of knowing that what’s in the past is in the past, and that it has no control over your life anymore. It’s underfoot, only tire tracks in the dirt now. You can’t help but feel a wave of peace at the thought.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Trouble Girls – Julia Lynn Rubin – while Lux and Trixie’s reasons for ditching their town are more complicated, there’s no less of a feeling that they’re giving it the finger the whole way out.

“The Gold” (Manchester Orchestra cover) – Phoebe Bridgers

Full disclosure: I hate the original version of this song. Hate it. It stinks of that kind of that faux-earnest, country-leaning pop that forced itself down everyone’s throats in the mid-2010’s like a contagion. If this weren’t obviously a breakup song, I know my music teacher would have made my 5th grade class sing this. I hate to relentlessly dog on a song, but also…Christ. This made me throw up in my mouth a little.

Phoebe Bridgers, on the other hand? A godsend. Leave it to her to make the original lyrics, some of which were actually good sound good, and not like they were being shoved down through the godforsaken Mumford & Sons strainer. I will give Manchester Orchestra (posers, they’re not even from Manchester…) some credit: “you’ve become my ceiling” is genuinely a beautiful lyric. But I just wish it wasn’t being delivered with that smarmy, offensive excuse for authenticity. Again: Phoebe Bridgers is our savior. She grounds this song enough to make the turmoil within it feel real. Never once did this song need belting, stadium-rock grandeur: it needed clarity, a sense of calm amidst the chaos, and a steady hand on an acoustic guitar. It’s got slightly more effects than Bridgers usually allots to a song of this tempo, but it hits the balance of flourish and that acoustic sincerity that she’s come to be known for. It’s a breakup song, but although some of those call for grandiose declarations of sorrow, some of them need time to sit in silence and wallow it in, and that’s exactly the treatment that Bridgers gave “The Gold.” I’ll just go ahead and pretend that she wrote it. Yup. Manchester Orchestra? Who is she?

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Vinyl Moon – Mahogany L. Browne – similarly, this novel in verse deals with the fallout of a relationship built on mistrust.

“Caesar on a TV Screen” – The Last Dinner Party

Before I listened to the full song, I distinctly remember seeing a snippet of this song advertised somewhere on Instagram and thinking something along the lines of “god, this is pretentious.” And I stand by that. It’s still pretentious. But in context, it’s a good listen.

I’ve heard a decent amount of buzz surrounding The Last Dinner Party, usually falling in one of two camps: that they’re out to save rock and roll and bring it back to its glory days, or that they’re just…okay? The former argument, while I like it in concept, reeks of the kind of mentality that “modern music isn’t good anymore” because it’s not all Pink Floyd, which…okay, cool if you like Pink Floyd, but also…creative rock didn’t die as soon as Y2K hit? You just have to look a little harder now that rock isn’t the reigning influence on popular music anymore. In the modern day, we treat rock music like we often treat women: as something to be saved, when all along, it’s been doing just fine, thank you. I doubt we’ll ever go back to those days, and maybe we shouldn’t—there’s no way you can completely replicate a movement in its full, temporal context, and maybe that’s okay. I’m all for bringing back glam rock, but chances are, anything you try to resurrect is going to feel displaced in our modern day context. You can take inspiration from them, but personally, it’s a hard thing to recreate in all of its flesh and blood.

Which…seems like a good deal of what The Last Dinner Party are going for. Frontwoman Abigail Morris has regularly emphasized how much she and the band enjoy being pretentious (if having their debut album titled Prelude to Ecstasy wasn’t enough of an indication), and if that’s what’s bringing them joy, then all power to them! They’re talented musicians, for sure. Weirdly, the other two songs of theirs that I listened to just sounded like…any old indie pop song, which I kind of hate to say, but if you’re all about “saving rock n roll” and just putting out that, then I feel like you have to keep your mission consistent. But you certainly get that feel from “Caesar on a TV Screen.” As far as the structure goes, it feels slightly disjointed, but the more I watch the music video, I get what they’re going for—a song with a distinct, three-act structure, emulating the epic, Shakespearean twists and turns that inspired it. There’s loads of drama to spare, from the rush of strings in the third act to Morris’ impassioned howl of “everyone will like me!” at the song’s exiting flourish, like she’s brandishing a prop sword with every word. It’s dripping with that kind of theatrical, ’70s and ’80s drama—there’s Queen written all over it, and I can’t help but think that some of that drama was informed by Kate Bush. And…yeah, Freddie Mercury, Kate Bush, and David Bowie, the latter of whom the band have repeatedly cited as one of their primary influences, are probably some of the most colossal shoes to fill in terms of musical artistry. But there’s no doubt that The Last Dinner Party are a skilled bunch in their own right—and god, they look like they’re having the time of their lives. It’s exactly the kind of excess, maximalism, and drama that their band name implies.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Strike the Zither (Kingdom of Three, #1) – Joan He – “When I was a child, I never felt like a child/I felt like an emperor with a city to burn” HMMM…

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!

Monthly Wrap-Ups

February 2024 Wrap-Up 🫀

Posted on February 29, 2024 by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Thursday, bibliophiles! Happy Leap Day too, I suppose.

Already the end of February, huh? Good riddance honestly. Not that I had a bad month, but I’m just ready for all this gross, slushy weather to be over with.

Let’s begin, shall we?

GENERAL THOUGHTS:

February’s definitely still been busy, but now that I’m more used to my schedule and able to keep myself on track, it’s all good. Things are getting into gear with my classes, I’ve been able to make time to write and make art and hang out with friends, and the weather is starting to warm up. Key word is starting. We’ve had snow almost every Friday or weekend without fail for…probably a month or two? Colorado. The meteorological indecision never ends. But luckily, other than that first week, I’ve been able to blog somewhat steadily.

Reading has been similarly good—sadly, most of the books I’ve read for school so far haven’t been my favorites (apologies in advance to all the Jane Austen fans here), but other than that, there have been very few misses! I also shifted my focus to books by Black authors this month for Black History Month, and I’ve read both familiar and new-to-me authors and had tons of fun. I also ended up having two five-star reads in a month, so I’d call it good! I’m glad that I’ve been able to keep up my reading schedule, because there’s so many books I’m excited to read soon! A whole bunch of holds from Libby have been pouring in, all of which I’ve been eagerly anticipating…

Other than that, I’ve just been cranking out tons of writing, drawing here and there, watching Abbott Elementary, BEEF (absolutely SHAKESPEAREAN lemme tell you), The Bear (ngl I’m mostly just in it for the needle drops), and Constellation (WHAT IS GOING ON 😀), and being in a near-constant state of being on my toes since I never know when we’re gonna get dumped with snow.

Oh, and I think we have the best possible end to a month that I’ve had in several months…BABE. WAKE UP. NEW ST. VINCENT JUST DROPPED. WE’RE GETTING THE ALBUM, TODAY’S THE DAAAAAAAAAAAY

APRIL 29TH CANNOT COME SOON ENOUGH.

READING AND BLOGGING:

I read 17 books this month! Definitely more than I expected to read, but I’m about at the point in the year where I’m familiar enough with my schedule that I can squeeze in more time for reading. There were definitely a few stinkers in the mix, but I had not one but two five star reads this month, which was pretty incredible! My eternal thanks to Audre Lorde and R.F. Kuang.

2 – 2.75 stars: