Tag: Gorillaz

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 11/30/25

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

I’ve got at least one more post here before I inevitably have to crawl back into the finals burrow. Since I’ve been out of the office lately, here are my graphics from the past few weeks:

11/9/25:

11/16/25:

11/23/25:

This week: What half of Britpop’s Big Four frontmen are up to these days, peak goth drama, and I finally find out why Joe Talbot was hiding out in that Gorillaz exhibit like Where’s Waldo.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 11/30/25

“Something Changed” – Pulp

Pulp recently put on an absolutely showstopping performance at NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert. I still have only a handful of Pulp songs that I really know, but even as a budding fan that initially knew only 1/4 songs in their setlist (that one being “This Is Hardcore,” yet another shoutout to my amazing dad for showing me that one!), their performance was an absolute joy. Even in the confines of said Tiny Desk, Jarvis Cocker has the most enigmatic, fluid stage presence that defies being simply Britpop and has transformed into a timeless charm. And now I have three more Pulp songs on my rotation!

“Something Changed” hooked me more than the rest, and it reminded me that I really just need to get over myself and listen to Different Class already. Themes of social and sexual frustration aside (see: “Live Bed Show”), Pulp seemed to have an uncanny ability to create such pure, resonant anthems without making them cloying or insincere. I never got around to talking about “Disco 2000” last year, but that song feels like the platonic ideal of a pure, passionate love song—it’s a small wonder that nobody’s used it in the end credits of a rom-com yet. (Maybe that’s for the best? It’d need a really good rom-com.) “Something Changed” has that same quality in softer shades, with Cocker crooning about the nature of chance against a backdrop of swelling, sunlit strings: “Do you believe there’s someone up above/And does he have a timetable directing acts of love?” For someone with a sense of humor as sardonic and often cynical as Cocker, it’s a display of sincerity that feels anything but inauthentic—you can tell that, to some degree, there’s a genuine feeling of being wonderstruck by the chances that led him to this point in time—and this whirlwind romance.

“Something Changed” starts at 8:05. While you’re here, though, the 7+ minute rendition of “This Is Hardcore” stopped me dead in my tracks. One of the best Tiny Desk Concerts this year, for sure.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Time and Time Again – Chatham Greenfield – “Oh, I could have stayed at home and gone to bed/I could have gone to see a film instead/You might have changed your mind and seen your friend/Life could have been very different but then/Something changed…”

“Any Guy” – Melanie

I never find Melanie songs organically, I just leech them off of TV shows about once a year (see: “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma” thanks to We Are Lady Parts). This one in particular came from the season 1 finale of Bad Sisters, and without spoiling anything, it rang out as a bitterly triumphant anthem for the culmination of a season’s worth of work to try and eliminate a man equivalent to Satan incarnate from the face of the earth. Season 1 has been out for a few years, but I’ll still refrain from spoilers.

But some needle drops get better and better the more that you think about them. Melanie fit along with the musical feel of Bad Sisters, primarily featuring needle drops from great women-fronted bands and musicians (Bikini Kill, Nancy Sinatra, Wet Leg, and of course, the theme song and score composed by the iconic PJ Harvey). Many of them feel more atmospheric other than a handful of very purposeful ones, but “Any Guy” relates so much to the character of Grace to me. A lot of Melanie’s earlier fame centered around how childish she looked—this was pre-“Brand New Key” and people derailing childhood innocence into Freudian nonsense, but there was a clear correlation between what people saw as an unassuming young woman and the talent that resided inside of her. That image remains after her death, but for me, Melanie’s her best when she lets loose—think of the righteous fury at the end of “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma!” That final belt at the end! Reckoning! “Any Guy” has that same explosive moment at the end; beneath the veneer of placid strings, Melanie stews about getting involved with a two-timing guy and feeling disposable, until her waver breaks into an impassioned howl of “Is she as pretty as me, huh?” Nothing’s better than when Melanie snaps and lets the full force of her voice free, and what better song to soundtrack a similarly unassuming, underestimated woman finally breaking free. Even when she’s singing of breaking away, there’s a waver in her voice, and that’s more Grace than anything—and there’s no shame in having a waver in your voice when you’ve finally mustered the courage to speak your mind.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Heartbreak Bakery – A.R. Capetta – breakups, miscommunication, and one very fateful batch of magic brownies…

“The God of Lying” (feat. IDLES) – Gorillaz

Guess who’s getting tickets to L.A. the minute that they announce when the House of Kong exhibit is coming?? Prepare for me to be INSUFFERABLE and IN CALIFORNIA

Back when they did the story on the London House of Kong exhibit over the summer, they showed the collage on the wall of all of Gorillaz’s collaborators over the years. There were tons of familiar faces: De La Soul, Yasiin Bey, Shaun Ryder, St. Vincent, et cetera…but I swore that I could see Joe Talbot peeking out from between the faces. And it got me thinking…had I missed something? Mind you, this was before The Mountain was announced, so I had no idea what was a head. But now that it’s here, I’m so excited for this pairing! As is the ritual with most modern Gorillaz rollouts, the singles are hit or miss. “The Happy Dictator” was loads of fun, but “The Manifesto” is somehow two different songs, and none of them are particularly good. And here we see the post-Humanz Gorillaz “where’s Damon?” problem—it’s all the collaborators and barely him.

Thankfully, “The God of Lying” fixed this issue swiftly, with Albarn trading off verses with Joe Talbot of IDLES. Gorillaz have been mining the state of dystopian discontent that we’re in for quite some time now, but if there’s anyone more fit for an antidote, it’s Talbot. As he coolly assesses the sorry state of the world (“Are you deafened by the headlines?/Or does your head not hear at all?/Are you pacified by passion/Are you armed to the teeth?”), Albarn’s distorted voice professes that we’ve all reached for some comfort beyond the bad news, but that it’s so overwhelming that we can’t even comprehend that hope is still possible; we’re actively “running to the exit” because we somehow fear the notion of hope existing even while trapped in an endless cycle of doomscrolling and horrific news. Albarn said this to BBC Radio 1: “I suppose I’ve kind of got in my head what happened a few days ago with Mamdani in New York. And one of the things he said that really kind of stuck out for me is that ‘Hope is alive’. And in this track, Joe and I are kind of we’ve been chased by hope. And I thought, Oh, that’s nice.” First off, since I was hunkered down doing homework when it happened…THAT’S MY MAYOR! (I’ve been to NYC a grand total of one time in my life…anyways.) Second, what a poetic assessment—we haven’t just abandoned hope, we’re being pushed away from it, pacifying the weight of carrying every bad thing in the world with fleeting pleasures and addiction. It’s a poignant statement for both Albarn and IDLES, enduring proof that love remains to be the fing.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

No Gods, No Monsters – Caldwell Turnbull – “Are you pacified by passion?/Are you armed to the teeth?/Are you bubbling at the surface of what’s cooking underneath?/Are you dying for an answer for what they call good grief?”

“A Night Like This” – The Cure

Another album that I need to listen to: The Head on the Door, apparently! As the result of being brought up by gothy parents who went to high school in the ’80s, I’ve practically listened to the whole thing. The same can be said for a fair amount of their albums. (From The Head on the Door in particular, I have a specific memory of my parents showing me the “Close to Me” video and thinking that the puppets were really funny.)

How perfect it was that I remembered “A Night Like This” right after Halloween. Frankly, every season is The Cure season if you can get with the drama 24/7, but you can’t deny that it’s the ideal fall or winter soundtrack. This track in particular represents the peak of what I love about The Cure—oh my god, the drama. I mean that without any irony, because there’s such an art to throwing yourself into it fully without looking insincere. You have to make a bit of a fool of yourself to sell it, but Robert Smith never looked the part to me—it was so intentional, and so clearly from a place of love. Lyrically, that’s what sells the glut of the song for me, but musically, what pulled it back from my memory was that guitar tone—so incredibly rich and full, and yet cavernous in a way that it couldn’t be considered goth without. It’s the closest I feel a guitar can sound to a cello without Jonny Greenwooding it with an actual cello—there’s a depth to the sound that feels like it could only come from an instrument with a hollow body. It’s all an undeniable spectacle of romantic (capital R Romantic and the usual sense) passion.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Red City – Marie Lu – “It goes dark, it goes darker still/Please stay/But I watch you like I’m made of stone/As you walk away…”

“Where the Road Goes Down from Two Lanes to One” – Julie Doiron, Michael Feuerstack, Land of Talk, & Dany Placard

I just put Julie Doiron on the graphic since she’s the main artist on this song, but I wanted to credit the rest here. I just don’t think I could fit everybody else in the tiny text in that tiny little rectangle, and I’m not about to give anybody eyestrain.

I found out about this soothing song through Black Belt Eagle Scout, who played several shows with Julie Doiron earlier this month. (Happy to see that they’re well enough to play music again!!) Either way, I was immediately charmed by the nostalgic calmness of this song; it’s a six-minute, lazy stroll down memory lane, buoyed by a series of multilayered harmonies. As Doiron strings together a series of vignettes about crushes on boys and late-night driving, she gives them the feeling of blurry, sun-bleached photos with the edges curled up from wear. Towards the end, as all four of their voices fall artfully out of sync, repeating “Can you say it how I remember/Will you say it how I remember/Can you sing it how I remember/Will you sing it how I remember?”, it brings into sound the feeling of memories tangling together in your mind, timelines hazy and blurred, but just as pleasant as they were in the moment.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Amelia, If Only – Becky Albertalli – “Get in the van, we’re late for a show/Still got four more hours to go/Road maps, glovebox, no phone/I need to pull over, I wanna call home…”

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: 9/28/25

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: You know what’s better than Monday? That’s right, Sun—[gets dragged offstage by a comically large cane]

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 9/28/25

“The Happy Dictator” (feat. Sparks) – Gorillaz

This song came out at the tail end of a terrible day for me…even though I’d experienced some pretty awful events in the past 24 hours, at least there was Gorillaz at the end of it. And a new album with Sparks, IDLES, and Yasiin Bey on it??? EVERYBODY SAY THANK YOU, GORILLAZ! March can’t come soon enough…

From the looks of it, Sparks are having a better 2025 than most of us, what with releasing MAD! and an accompanying EP—collaborating with Gorillaz just seems to be the cherry on top for them. It’s surprising that it’s taken so long for them to collaborate. Either way, they’ve come together to sprinkle some healthy satire and upbeat tunes on this dystopian hellscape, and I am all the better for it. As always, Albarn has an eye trained on…well, the trajectory of most of the world right now, but he weaves a tale of opulent tyranny, of dictators who shroud their dirty deeds in illusions of placidity, peace, and universal happiness; it was specifically inspired by a visit to Turkmenistan with his daughter, where the former dictator, Saparmurat Niyazov, “wanted everyone in Turkmenistan to only think happy thoughts and sleep unaffected by the doom of the world, and just keep everything upbeat, so he kind of banned all bad news.” Even though his rule ended decades ago, echoes of it can be heard the world over, and Gorillaz is once again here to critique them: “In a world of fiction, I am a velvet glove/I am your soul, your resurrection, I am the love.” It’s…well, frankly, if I emptied out all the parallels, this post would be impossibly long and I would be even more dismal about the news than I already am. At least, in these turbulent times, we can count on Gorillaz to weave some excellent art out of the collective suffering. Plus, if Russell Mael is the dictator in this situation, then y’know what? All hail our new overlord.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Sunrise on the Reaping – Suzanne Collins – …need I really say more?

“Glider” – Japanese Breakfast

I promise I’ll stop blabbering about Japanese Breakfast soon, but the concert’s had me on such a kick of their music since the beginning of the month. I wasn’t familiar with any of Michelle Zauner’s soundtrack work before the concert, and I wasn’t familiar with the video game Sable at all. (I’m fairly video game illiterate, but it looks super cool, honestly—from what I can tell, you’re basically exploring the ruins of an ancient civilization on a desert planet, and the art was inspired by Moebius. You had me at Moebius!) This game was Zauner’s first foray into soundtracks.

At the Japanese Breakfast show, Zauner whipped this one out of nowhere solely because she’d heard somebody humming it before the show, which should tell you everything about how cool she is as a person. The instrumentation is fairly different than most of her work—it’s much more synth-based, but it works well with something like “Posing in Bondage.” It has a chiming, starry quality to it, just the kind of music I’d imagine hearing while wandering the desert on a sci-fi glider. Once her lyrics fade out of the recognizable and into the more abstract, pulled apart like putty by autotune and editing, it takes on an almost Cocteau Twins quality to it, but if they had been transposed into glaring sunlight and not the wintry sound palettes I usually associate with them. “Glider” is weightless, always looking skyward, yearning and hoping.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Light at the Bottom of the World – London Shah – I feel like “Glider” fits in a multitude of sci-fi settings, but somehow, it feels particularly at home in London Shah’s vision of a flooded England and submersible races.

“Better Than Monday” – Ginger Root

Opening bands are always a gamble, but somehow, I’ve had unusually good luck with them this year—Hana Vu, Tyler Ballgame, and Black Country, New Road are some of the standouts. I went to Japanese Breakfast with a dear friend of mine, and neither of us really knew Ginger Root, and the only person we knew who knew him was a mutual friend. We looked on his Spotify bio, where he described his music as “aggressive elevator soul.” So, in a word, our expectations were…lowered? But we were morbidly curious.

Honestly? I wouldn’t go back and listen to everything of Ginger Root’s, but at the end of the day, I can’t deny how creative of a guy Cameron Lew is. Not only does he have this very polished indie pop act going, he’s also got an entire short film, which he played excepts of during his show. He’s a talented musician, and his band is too, and god, he’s got his hyperspecific vibe down to a science, so I can’t fault him for that. It ventured from more soul-oriented songs to instrumentals that sounded like they should’ve been in the background of MarioKart, but dammit, the guy’s got a vibe going. Plus, anyone who puts absolutely everything into getting an action shot of a melodica solo has my approval…as much as I hate to admit it. “Better Than Monday” was my immediate standout—the bassline is just so propulsive and bouncy, and it’s just such a bright, sleek song. It’s one of those songs where you know from the get-go how much fun Lew and company had making it—the enthusiasm radiates from every note, and that was half of the fun of their opening set. Catchy songs are great on their own, but they’re even catchier when you know that every part of the process was a blast.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Finna – Nino Cipri – it feels odd to say that Ginger Root works perfectly for a book set in an inter-dimensional, legally-distinct IKEA, but life is full of surprises.

“Sunken Treasure” – Wilco

A song with the line “music is my savior” and a refrain repeating adages about rock n’ roll is bound to be a crowd favorite—hook, line, and sinker. Yet none of this song strikes me as cliched. Just because it rouses a crowd doesn’t mean there’s no truth to it. And who could be better than that than Jeff Tweedy?

That’s not even the real sunken treasure of “Sunken Treasure.” I’d only remembered this song when I saw Wilco play it live back in August, but it’s so jam-packed with showstopping lyrics that it made me astounded that I hadn’t listened to it more attentively when I’d heard it in my dad’s car…because I definitely had. It was an inevitability that I’d come back to this gem. Just…okay, it’s about to be a “just copying and pasting the lyrics” moment, because my god:

“There’s rows and rows of houses/With windows painted blue/With the light from a TV/Running parallel to you/But there is no sunken treasure/Rumored to be/Wrapped inside my ribs/In a sea, black with ink…”

The fact that I’m now picturing the Muppet talking houses notwithstanding, I am once again asking Jeff Tweedy to save some poetic talent for the rest of us. Come on. It’s one of those songs with such a near-universal theme—melancholy and relationships sputtering out—and painted it in a way no other artist has. To some extent, we all go through a handful of the same experiences in our lives, and yet nobody can retell it in the exact same way as the person next to them, despite sharing 99% of their DNA with them. “Sunken Treasure” makes me think of that, because I doubt anybody else would pair that feeling with “If I had a mountain/I’d try and roll it over.” Roiling in the background is a veritable red-hot pot of soup boiling over—it feels like a quieter precursor to “Via Chicago” with distorted, crumbling-brick guitars collapsing in the background, strings pulled to the limits. It’s the instrumental epitome of insisting that you’re fine and unbothered, but deep down…there’s no sunken treasure rumored to be wrapped inside your ribs, etc.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Seep – Chana Porter – “But there is no sunken treasure/Rumored to be/Wrapped inside my ribs/In a sea, black with ink/I am so/Out of tune/With you…”

“midori” – mary in the junkyard

With the steady breadcrumb trail of singles that mary in the junkyard have been putting out since the end of last year, I can only hope that this mean that there’s an album on the way…or an EP, at the very least. Paired with “drains,” which came out this summer, they’re surely building up to something…something! But in the meantime, I’m just pleased to be getting new music from this burgeoning talent every few months. They’re like little spooky, rock treats.

That being said, “midori” feels slightly weaker than some of their other singles. It’s not bad by any stretch—the fact that this is weak for mary in the junkyard is a testament to how consistently good they are—but it feels like it could’ve been one of the songs from this old house – EP. It’s a double-edged sword: it could’ve been a great addition to last year’s EP, but I fear that at their worst, this song doesn’t stray as far from their older ones. On the other sides of their discography, “drains” took their sound to an extreme and “this is my california” took it in a softer, more introspective direction. Granted, they have an EP and a handful of singles to their name, so I hesitate to really call it a formula—only nine songs doesn’t really give anybody the full idea of their sound or what they have left in store.

And even if they’ve got a formula (which, again, very hesitant to say), it’s a damn good one. I say that as if I’m not eating up pretty much everything they do…mary in the junkyard are proving themselves to be masters of their atmospheric craft. Their electric guitars sound like they’ve been draped in a decaying bridal veil and left to get haunted for a century or so—everything echoes and brims with an untold history. “midori” was written entirely about plants coming out of concrete, and Clari Freeman-Taylor manages to transform the subject into the angstiest thing possible: “Could you help it?/With no god to bow down to/And no soil to grow down in/Could you help it?” Feeble sprouts become desperate, mewling spirits in her hands, and the echoing guitars and strings turn urban nature into a sweeping and creeping epic, shrouded in ivy with leaves wilting at the tips. It gives the air of something waiting to be free—you can just barely hear some squealing sounds in the background, the sound of something desperate to claw free—exactly the kind of fare mary in the junkyard expertly deals in.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Maid and the Crocodile – Jordan Ifueko – “Though I am concrete-bound/I am fragrant/I get old and get out/I am fake and dead…”

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 (9/16/25) – Mistress of Bones

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Guess who’s back/back again…with a negative review. Oopsies.

Yeah, sorry. I feel like this always happens, and I hate that it’s happening a) right when I come back to blogging in earnest and b) at the start of Latine Heritage Month. I swear this has happened so many times. (Don’t worry! I made a whole post about so many more books by Latine authors that are actually worth a read!) But a gal’s gotta review some bad books sometimes, and remember, kids: a book’s diversity doesn’t immediately mean that there aren’t any issues with the writing.

I’ve been hearing about Mistress of Bones around the blogosphere, and the premise seemed like some classic, YA fantasy fun. I regret to inform you that I’ve once again been duped into reading a very lackluster and generic fantasy book. There’s some slack I’m willing to give this novel because it’s Maria Z. Medina’s debut, but god, I haven’t read such a hot mess in quite some time.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Mistress of Bones – Maria Z. Medina

Azul de Arroyo cares for little more in life than her beloved older sister, who had an early death at fourteen. But by channeling the bone magic of her people, she was able to resurrect her at a young age. But when her sister is killed again, she has no choice to journey to the capital city in order to steal back her sister’s bones and return her to life. Soon, Azul has run afoul of the Emissary of Lord Death; her escapades have not gone unnoticed, and he’s got his eye on her. The rules of Death cannot be reversed so easily, and he’ll do anything to stop her—however pulled he is to her. Dragged into a tangled web of dark magic and court intrigue, Azul must do everything in her power to bring her sister back—even at the cost of the world.

TW/CW: animal death, loss of loved ones, violence, gore, murder

DNF at about 60%. I just couldn’t take it. I really tried to make it through this one, but at a certain point, I realized just how fleeting life is, and wanted to spend that life with something other than this novel.

Listen. There’s a certain amount of slack I’m willing to give a novel like this based on a) the fact that it’s a debut novel, and b) how hard it is to get published as a marginalized author. Every novel is, to some extent, a labor of love, and I’m sure this was the truth for Mistress of Bones. I don’t mean to discount the work of Medina and anybody else involved. But god, this was a MESS. Labor of love as writing always is, this needed at least two more rounds of editing. At LEAST.

The problem with the setup of Mistress of Bones wasn’t that it had a nonlinear timeline. I don’t even know if I would call it nonlinear, but there aren’t adequate words to describe…quite what the situation with this novel is. It’s less nonlinear and more just thousands of flashbacks in a trenchcoat posing as a novel. I didn’t mind them in the prologue, and in fact, I did actually enjoy the way the prologue set up the narrative and the tone of the story. It was appropriately spooky and it set up Azul’s character nicely—it got the job done. However, this novel ended up being 50% flashbacks. Mind you, they weren’t just to the same period as the prologue, but jumping to entirely random years in the past. None of it made any logical sense, and not even in a convoluted way—it wasn’t complex, the plot points were just scattered every which way. At that point, if that much of your plot is propped up by taking random detours into the past, there’s something desperately wrong with the plot. Take the flashbacks away, and the plot was just the writing equivalent of a pile of crumpled-up tissues on the ground.

I’m usually one for bombastic dialogue; in fact, I’d like to think that I have a good tolerance, given the steady diet of classic sci-fi novels and ’80s X-Men comics I consumed when I was in high school. If done right, campy dialogue can enhance the atmosphere and the writing style in many ways. But Mistress of Bones missed the mark by miles. The key to its downfall was how self-serious it all was. Once again: I still read a good amount of YA, and there’s a certain amount of drama that you’ve got to accept from the get-go. But Medina constantly had teenagers exclaiming “Bah!” like Romantic English poets and then spouting off the corniest lines of dialogue known to man without an inch of self-awareness. (Thomas Thorne-core, and I don’t mean that in a good way. iykyk.) It was just so self-serious that it defeated the purpose of amping up the drama. What’s more is that all of the characters had the exact same voice. I expected it to be just reserved for the spooky edgelord male YA love interest, but no…they were ALL involved in this. If you’re aiming for drama, you at least have to do it right.

Speaking of the characters…they were also woefully mishandled. I’m wise enough in my older years (read: my early twenties) to know that hardly any YA fantasy book marketed with a Six of Crows comparison delivers. But this was a special kind of mismarketing. First off, only Azul, the Emissary, and Nereida really got any page time. There were a handful of other purportedly important characters skittering about somewhere, but they got so little page time that I lost interest in them and their minimal sway over the plot. Not only that, but even between the main characters, they all had virtually the same voice. They all had that pompous, overly self-serious tone that I spoke about earlier, but there was almost zero variation between any of them. You mean to say that a witch, the emissary of death himself, and a seventeen year old girl would have the exact same speaking voice? It’s almost like they were indistinguishable from each other on purpose—I can’t think of any other explanation for the breadth of how far this hot mess spreads.

Beneath it all, I can’t really say that there was much about Mistress of Bones that grabbed my attention. There were a few quirks in the worldbuilding that kept me reading for a good length, but they were barely sustained. I’m always excited to see Latine-inspired worlds and cultures in genre fiction, but it barely extended past the Spanish-inspired names. I was intrigued by the whole concept of the floating continents and the gods that mandated this seismic shift, but it barely seemed to have any bearing on the plot or the characters. The Emissary of Death should’ve had significant sway over the plot and over Azul’s actions, but the title only served to give him more edgelord love interest points. Looking back, I think this issue boils down most of my problems with Mistress of Bones as a whole: it was all setup with no payoff. We were promised a multilayered, multi-POV fantasy with romance and intrigue, and we only got the bones of those things (no pun intended). It was all skeleton, with no skin or muscle tissue to make the novel into something that could function on its own.

All in all, a novel full of messy, undelivered promises masquerading as a plot. 1.5 stars.

Mistress of Bones is Maria Z. Medina’s debut novel and the first novel in the Mistress of Bones duology; no information is currently available about the sequel.

Today’s song:

GORILLAZ AND SPARKS, THIS IS NOT A DRILL

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: 8/10/25

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: a David Bowie double feature (who could’ve seen that coming?), upcoming artsy albums, and more reasons why I really just wish I had dual British citizenship, because apparently all of the good music related stuff happens exclusively in the UK.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 8/10/25

“Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?” – Cate Le Bon

I could really do with some more restrained excitement about Michelangelo Dying, but…these singles just aren’t letting me do it! They’re both so enchanting! I can’t get enough!! I’m really hoping they’re not the best of the bunch, but I have faith that Cate Le Bon has something quirkily artsy up her sleeve, if this and “Heaven Is No Feeling” are any indication.

“Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?” takes the palette of the album down a more subdued, melancholy route than “Heaven Is No Feeling,” trading the former’s synthy strut for glassy-eyed introspection. But even with the thematic shift, Le Bon’s signature modern touches are there. Awash in fizzling, electronic textures, this track is an outstretched bolt of lavish fabric, much like the pink background of the album cover. Silky and watery, it makes every instrument feel like it’s been drenched in sunlit water, from the gentle, barely perceptible bass to the saxophones. I’m not usually this big of a fan of saxophones, but the way Le Bon utilizes them, more for added sonic texture than for dramatic solos, make her world even more layered and delectable to pick apart. It’s distinctively her, but I can’t help but think of the dense, dreamy soundscapes of the Cocteau Twins when I listen to it. (“For Phoebe Still A Baby” jumps out in particular.) Yet drama is what this song quietly thrives on, as the lyrics muse on trying to make light out of abject sorrow: “Open up in hell/And dress the hall/It’s a holiday/It’s a birthday/Is it worth it?/Is it worth it?” The lyrics nearly get swallowed by the sheer magnitude of sounds woven into the production—including the signature, lilting cadence of Le Bon’s voice—but it almost seems exactly her intention. It feels both mean and inaccurate to call any of it window dressing, but next to the lyrics, all about trying to laugh heartbreak away and pretend it’s something that it’s not, it feels like exactly the kind of shrouding she’s singing about. At the end, she laments that she’s “Checking out/Even with my language in him,” just as the listener tries to extricate her from the vibrant sea of sound she’s crafted to shield herself. It’s easy to get washed away in, and if the rest of Michelangelo Dying is anything like this, I’ll be gladly losing myself in it come September.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Ephemera Collector – Stacy Nathaniel Jackson – “Open up in hell/And dress the hall/It’s a holiday/It’s a birthday/Is it worth it?”

“Saviour Machine” – David Bowie

“David Bowie predicted ChatGPT” would’ve been a good headline for this post, but as much as I love him, he was far from the first to ponder about AI. But really…this song does basically predict ChatGPT, and in this song it’s “President Joe” who introduces it to the world, which is kind of a crazy coincidence. Had to do a double take when I first heard the lyrics, for sure. Drawing from much of the sci-fi media of his time, Bowie’s version of AI comes in the form of The Prayer, an AI system introduced by President Joe to make the population’s decisions easier for them, from stopping wars to simply thinking themselves. However, it’s The Prayer itself that calls for its own destruction, going insane after having such decisions weighing on its shoulders and pondering: “Please don’t believe in me/Please disagree with me/Life is too easy/A plague seems quite feasible now/Or maybe a war/Or I may kill you all!” Life is too easy for sure, now that everyone’s trying to flirt and make art and music and go through school entirely with AI. Sorry, but can’t you idiots stop and forgo convenience to experience the tedious pleasures of the human experience? Embarrassing. Jesus Christ. Remember, kids: you can’t stake your life on a savior machine.

“Saviour Machine” rings reminiscent of short stories of the likes of Ray Bradbury, but it also reflects the much darker tone of The Man Who Sold the World. Though it wasn’t like he hadn’t trod into darker lyrical subjects before, going from something like “Uncle Arthur” to an album comprised of insane asylums, the Vietnam War, and gay sex with Satan in the span of three years is a whiplash-inducing left turn for anyone. I don’t think it’s the edginess of the subject matter that makes it feel more mature, but the exploration—The Man Who Sold the World represents a critical turning point in Bowie’s storytelling ability, and he was willing to explore places that he hadn’t explored before, pushing himself out of his typical territory in order to create something wholly unique. It feels to me what he said when he spoke about art: “If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.” Darkness was coincidental, and of course, not all of the album is necessarily dark—it was merely territory that he hadn’t scoured before, and that challenge led him to create some of his most innovative work, time after time, album after album. “Saviour Machine” feels like the prelude to that storyteller’s attitude, one that would guide him to untold heights in his career.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Outside – Ada Hoffmann – A few centuries in the future, when something like The Prayer gets out of control…

“Real Lovin” – Black Belt Eagle Scout

Katherine Paul has a distinctly whispery voice—everything they sing sounds like they’re singing it into a cool breeze. Most of her music pre-The Land, the Water, the Sky suits it perfectly; though she’s become more adventurous with her vocal capabilities later on, a lot of her songs had a slower, softer demeanor that suited the airiness of her voice. But if there’s any song to be characterized by this, it would be this one. I’d forgotten all about “Real Lovin” for years—I initially listened to At the Party With My Brown Friends around five years ago—until it popped back into my shuffle out of nowhere. Though Paul’s voice soars with more volume towards the end of the track, her whisper-singing is perfectly suited to the quiet tenderness of the lyrics: “Now that you can dream/What is it you see/When you wake up in the folds of blankets in your bed/In your room/In your house/By yourself?” It’s the sound of a sliver of dewy light sliding through the slats of shutters in the early morning as you blink away the threads of sleep. Paul’s voice is a comfortable sheet over me as I listen, and she delivers what’s easily the softest, tenderest uttering of “well that’s bullshit” I’ve ever heard in a song. But no matter the intensity, which rises with every passing minute as the instrumentals build up, I never have a doubt that Paul means exactly what she’s saying.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Each of Us a Desert – Mark Oshiro – “You’ve tried and tried/What seems a million times and you wonder how you’ll end up/Is it the moon?/Is it the stars?/Do they rule you and your heart?”

“Crocadillaz (feat. De La Soul and Dawn Penn)” – Gorillaz

While I froth at the mouth that I can’t go to the Gorillaz exhibit in London, I figured it would be fitting to talk about them…for the millionth time on this blog.

It was a strangely pivotal moment when, a week after Cracker Island released back in early 2023, three more songs were added to the lineup. I had middling thoughts about the album up until then; for me, it represented the point at which Gorillaz (and later Blur with The Ballad of Darren) became nearly indistinguishable from Damon Albarn’s solo work. There were a handful of fun tracks, but as a whole, it failed to hold as much water as something like their first three records, even with the star-studded list of collaborators. And when it seemed all hope was lost…Del the Funky Homosapien and De La Soul returned! (Two years later, “Captain Chicken” has no business being so good for a song with such a goofy title AND samples of chicken clucks. God, it’s so good.) Disregarding the “Momentz” haters (heathens, all of you), every time De La Soul and Gorillaz collaborate, a special kind of magic happens. Even with Trugoy the Dove’s too-soon death hanging over it, “Crocadillaz” was one of the unmistakable highlights of the album. For a song about constantly looking over your shoulder and the trappings of fame, it has a steady, easy calmness to it, propelled by Dawn Penn’s “Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo” chorus, which gets delightfully stuck in my head more often than not. Trugoy and Penn make for an unlikely but smooth pairing for this song, with the former providing the sharp-edged, quick-witted verses and Penn’s smooth, resonant vocals giving the song a simultaneously retrospective and playful chorus. I’m not usually a fan of the “Gorillaz but it’s just the collaborators” songs, but with a pairing as talented as these two, it’s easy to excuse.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

So Let Them Burn – Kamilah Cole – “Could play the sheep, but beware of the wolf’s eye/Hypnotized by the crocodile’s smiles/The exchange is brief, but watch for the teeth…”

“Watch That Man” – David Bowie

Aladdin Sane has to be the most iconic album cover in David Bowie’s catalogue. If you know any album cover, it’s that one—the nondescript, asleep-looking Bowie with a glittering lightning bolt slashing across the front of his face. And that silvery bit on his collarbone—I always thought it was a bone fragment when I was a kid, and my dad thought it was something like mercury pooling on his skin. It raises questions! It sticks in your head! And yet, the album cover gets talked about much more than the actual album. Sure, it’s probably the weakest if we’re grouping it in with Hunky Dory and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, but that’s because you’re grouping it with two of the greatest albums of all time. But it’s really such a disservice that the album only gets remembered for the cover—there are so many excellent cuts from the album, even if it never usually makes the cut for hit Bowie songs (except for maybe “The Jean Genie”). It’s slick as hell, incredibly funky…it just rocks. Listen to the album and you just know. And “Watch That Man” is what sets the tone, a rollicking dance floor rocker that begs for you to shake your hips with every word—not just the “shakin’ like a leaf” bit. Inspired by seeing the New York Dolls live, “Watch That Man” follows a lively party, with the lyrical camera roving over every participant as the music blasts. I never had any particular problem with the mix, but it was one of the more rushed songs on the album, and on reflection, doesn’t sound as clean as some of the other tracks—it’s all a bit muddy, with most of the instruments, Bowie’s voice included, being at a very similar volume. But for a song meant to emulate the rush of a concert or being on a crowded dance floor, it gets the job done spectacularly.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Kings, Queens, and In-Betweens – Tanya Boteju – dancing, parties, and no shortage of glitter and makeup.

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: 7/27/25

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: Aquarium gravel music, driving-in-the-summer music, and music that I would’ve made a badly-animated Warriors AMV for in elementary school, if I had the capabilities.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 7/27/25

“Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” – Car Seat Headrest

Yeah, yeah. I will not shut up about the Car Seat Headrest show two weeks ago. This is a threat. Consider this me gripping the sides of your head and forcing you to look at this screen and listen to a painfully awkward gay man’s earth-shattering voice cracks. You WILL listen.

After talking about how he doesn’t play much of his old music anymore, namely that of Teens of Denial, Will Toledo said that this song was one of the more optimistic songs he’d written during that period, where he described himself as an “angry young man.” This is going to sound incredibly corny, but stay with me. I knew all the words to “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” for years, but it wasn’t until then that it really hit me. That’s when I knew them. Granted, I was 13 and focused more on the enigmatic wails of Will Toledo and the raw wave of emotion that swept me up in the undertow, but I never quite considered that, in the midst of an album steeped in substance abuse, self-hatred, and depression, that this is a much more optimistic outlook on it all. (Speaking of said substance abuse, I really think that listening to Teens of Denial so much when I was younger was unironically very good drug prevention for me. Sure, a good 50-75% of their songs up to 2016 are about drinking and drugs, but they’re all about just how deeply miserable Toledo was while drinking and doing drugs. They need to implement this album in schools instead of D.A.R.E.) I wouldn’t be surprised if “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” was the last song of the album written; it takes a more retrospective look at the cycle of self-hatred and bad decisions that color Teens of Denial as a whole, and it offers a knowing look, a hug, and a rallying cry: “It doesn’t have to be like this.” From the outside looking in, Toledo looks at the wreckage of everything he’s done up to this point, and professes this to his own anxieties:

“Here’s that voice in your head/Giving you shit again/But you know he loves you/And he doesn’t mean to cause you pain/Please listen to him/It’s not too late/Turn off the engine/Get out of the car/And start to walk.”

GOD. OW. That’s another way homer. I suppose it’s taken years for it to hit me like it was likely intended to, but that’s probably for the best. I think of recent times, when I was so wrapped up in my own anxiety that I didn’t even realize that I could make the choice to work with it, to create a life for myself that would result in me being a happier, healthier person. I’m still on that road. Every day, it’s a little more effort. But it’s all worth it, brick by brick. As Toledo says, “But if we learn how to live like this/Maybe we can learn how to start again/Like a child who’s never done wrong/Who hasn’t taken that first step.” The power is always in your hands, whether you realize it or not. You can’t make every negative thing in your life disappear into thin air, but you can make those choices, take control of the wheel and start to steer your life in a better direction. It takes a monumental, gradual effort, but IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS. It never does. Looking back to a year ago, I can’t be more proud of myself for taking that leap, of leaning into my support system to try little by little to end the cycle of anxiety that I was falling into. This song couldn’t have come back to me at a better time. You can always learn to start again.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Seep – Chana Porter – learning to break free of a state of societal complacency in disguise as betterment, and learning to live with grief, love, and every other complicated emotion.

“Stay” – Shakespears Sister

There’s a brief window in every decade where the signature sounds haven’t yet been cemented. It’s a limbo that allows for the final bastions of the last decade’s sound to grab ahold. This song comes to mind, because this is quite possibly the most ’80s song of the ’90s.

My mom knew exactly what she was doing when she played this for me. I feel like I was around 8 or 9 when she first played it for me. I wished I remembered more of the specifics, because I definitely had some kind of elaborate Warrior Cats AMV planned in my head set to this, but I remember just being so enraptured. It was one of those songs that instantly marked its place in my memory: I was in the backseat of the car, at a gas station, and the sky was overcast, and I’d just had a revelation. My mom and I are definitely interlinked at critical points in my music history, and the more I think about it, “Stay” was absolutely one of them. Like…how did I not know that the album was called Hormonally Yours? I mean, what else is there to say other than fuck yea, that’s an album title??

“Stay” is pure drama, and as over-the-top and gloriously camp as it is, in the right amount, that’s my absolute catnip. Funny that I should mention catnip, because despite the ubiquitous lyrics, it was meant to be part of a concept album, all based around [checks notes] this ’50s sci-fi movie called Cat-Women of the Moon. (Hence this song.) “Stay” was intended to be about the love story between one of said Cat-Women and one of the human male crew members of the ship to the moon, with Marcella Detroit being the Cat-Woman in love and Siobhan Fahey taking the part of, one of the other Cat-Women who shuns their romance. Despite Shakespear’s Sister not being able to execute the concept album as they wanted to, “Stay” retains the high drama and yearning present in the original idea. Over-the-top as it is, I can’t help but be enraptured by it, the same way that I was when I was a little kid. The dueling voices of Detroit and Fahey craft a story of operatic proportions, cranking the yearning up to 11.

Even though the Cat-Women of the Moon never saw the light of day, what did survive is glorious—namely the music video for “Stay.” Instead, we’ve got a vague sci-fi setting, where Detroit is doting over a comatose man, and Fahey is Death tempting the man to come to the other side, complete with a star crown and some absolute Harley Quinn crazy eyes. It’s so camp. God, I love it.

Jenny Joyce could never.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Death’s Country – R.M. Romero – I’m aligning more with the music video interpretation here, but what’s more high drama than going into the underworld to save your girlfriend from the brink of death?

“Re-Hash” – Gorillaz

Nothing like a great pop song about how much pop music sucks.

Gorillaz, at least in the early days, was a study in artificiality. The project famously came about because Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett had been watching a lot of reality TV and hearing the much more manufactured aspect of pop music at the time (“It’s the sweet sensation over the dub/A one-off situation that don’t wanna stop”), and wondered if they could take it to the extreme: an entirely artificial band. In a way, “Re-Hash” was them slyly taking a shot at what Albarn viewed to be the state of pop music at the time, before blowing it out of the water and making the most artful indie-pop music possible. That first album is almost a no-skip album, and there’s no shortage of tracks that I constantly revisit. I hadn’t listened to “Re-Hash” in quite some time, and I’d forgotten just how incredible of an opener it is. Admittedly, my association with their self-titled album will always be of summer, since I’m pretty sure I first listened to it in July or August back in high school, but everything about “Re-Hash” is soaked in sunshine, with a combination of acoustic guitars mixed with drum machines that begs for a rolled down window. That Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-aaaaah repetition towards the last third of the song is just infectious—without a doubt, a very recent holdover the more playful side of Blur’s discography. What a propulsive start to such an iconic album.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Hammajang Luck – Makana Yamamoto – I’m going more off of vibes and atmosphere than lyrics, but this would fit right in with the more lighthearted sides of Yamamoto’s sci-fi world.

“Miami” – Cate Le Bon

Oh my god, CATE LE BON!! Reward is an excellent album as a whole—I’d say that it’s just about equal to Pompeii as far as consistency, creativity, and the uniqueness of the soundscape. Although she’d begun to transition into the more synth-dominated part of her sound here, Reward has a more naturalistic feel to it. Even if the album cover didn’t have her bent over, walking over the contours of a time-worn cliff against an overcast sky, it has this inherent aura to it that feels like having the wind toss your hair as you walk along a pebbly beach as a storm brewing in the distance. The comparison that jumped out immediately to me was Damon Albarn’s The Nearer the Fountain, the More Pure the Stream Flows, an album with similarly rocky shore imagery on the album cover and throughout the lyrics. I wouldn’t expect such a feeling to brew in me from an album dominated by artsy brass and woodwinds and synth in equal measure (lots of great clarinet and saxophone action here, similar to Albarn).

In my exploration into her music, I’ve found a constant in Cate Le Bon’s more recent work: she’s damn good at making an opening track (see also: “Dirt on the Bed”). “Miami” sounds like being in a goldfish bowl. The bright, percussive synths in the background bubble like an aquarium filter, while others sound like water sliding against glass. Some of the more recognizable percussion hushes like aquarium gravel crunching in the palm of your hand. It’s all so strangely aquatic, even with the steady blast of saxophones in the background. It honestly feels far more appealing than the actual Miami, but then again, my only experience of Miami was a grotty hotel, so maybe that’s my overall Florida bias. But I’d be hard-pressed to think of a song on Reward that’s better suited to open up Le Bon’s peacefully avant-garde soundscape than this one. It lulls you into a state of calm while enticing you forward with breadcrumbs of her signature, off-kilter charm. The lilt of her voice is as much an element of the ecosystem as the brass or the synths; if anything, it’s the goldfish in this metaphor, her voice like the smooth, effortless flap of fins underwater.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Letter to the Luminous Deep – Sylvie Cathrall – a gentle and tender dispatch from a submerged world.

“You’re Damaged” – Waxahatchee

For all intents and purposes, I really should be into Waxahatchee. Stylistically, she’s often grouped in the company of Snail Mail, Adrianne Lenker, and Soccer Mommy, which should be a massive red cape to my sad indie rock bull. (In fact, my reigning association with her is this one tweet that reads “I would personally be afraid of snail mail because she’s friends with waxahatchee and waxahatchee looks like she open carries”) But the main thing that keeps me from enjoying her most of the time is her voice. It’s fully just personal preference, and I’m sure she’s very talented, but Waxahatchee feels like proof that singing in cursive isn’t exclusive to pop music. Please!! Sing without over-enunciating everything!! My god!!

Thankfully, there are exceptions to the rule. “You’re Damaged” fits snugly into the indie rock that I usually love, with Katie Crutchfield’s sparse, bare vocals. Here, her voice soars, free of expectations, dipping deftly from hard to soft as she runs circles around memories of a broken relationship: “And no I can not see into the future/No I cannot breathe underwater/Bit your last word, I call out to you/This place is vile, and I’m vile too.” It mirrors the album cover of Cerulean Salt, where Crutchfield is blurry and submerged underwater, her face obscured by her own hair and the ripples of the water; rambling through the misty glass shards of memory, she struggles to break away from an unhealthy relationship when she’s just as unhealthy as the other part, wanting them when everything around her screams for her to do the opposite. It’s the kind of song that only a raw voice and an acoustic guitar can capture, and it does so hauntingly.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Desert Echoes – Abdi Nazemian – “And no I can not see into the future/No I cannot breathe underwater/Bit your last word, I Call out to you/This place is vile, and I’m vile too…”

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: 2/9/25

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: there’s never a bad time to listen to Gorillaz, but I certainly could’ve timed when I listened to Humanz better.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 2/9/25

“Swamp Dream #3” – Everything Is Recorded & mary in the junkyard

We now return to some much-needed mary in the junkyard-posting. I suspect it’ll become consistent…at some point. Not to pressure them, but hopefully this year (or the next) holds a full-length album in the future?

In the meantime, we have an excellent collaboration between them and Everything Is Recorded, the stage name of producer Richard Russell (also the founder of XL Records); he’s produced several albums under the name, often amassing a wide variety of musicians and songwriters to bolster them in a Gorillaz-like way, minus the cartoon characters. His forthcoming album, Richard Russell is Temporary, includes the likes of Florence Welch, Kamasi Washington, Noah Cyrus, Roses Gabor (a.k.a. the singing voice of Noodle on “DARE”), Bill Callahan, and mary in the junkyard! Granted, I hadn’t heard of Everything Is Recored until mary in the junkyard announced this single, but if this guy’s the owner of a record label, I could only hope this would introduce this fantastic, burgeoning gem of a band to a wider audience.

If “Swamp Dream #3” becomes the band’s ambassador, I wouldn’t mind either. Even though it’s more electronic than most of their catalogue, it’s got a naturalistic, moss-covered feel to it that you can’t scrape off of their sound no matter how many synths you paste onto it. It has the juddering thrum of rusted machines, all at once simple and a doorway into a hidden world; although I love the music video, “Swamp Dream #3” is begging for some kind of stop-motion treatment. I imagine it as an outside view of a termite’s mound or a rabbit’s warren, with the camera panning over clay worms poking out of the dirt and tiny insects, moles, and other underground rodents traversing the vast network of tunnels. (The real worms and beetles suffice, though.) Clari Freeman-Taylor’s vocals bring a kind of wonder to the song, a curiosity that isn’t quite childlike, but still seeks to shove its hands into the sand and the dirt, searching for hidden pathways and possibilities: “Mystery of my own flesh/I’ll never stop wondering/Never stop/Turning inside out.” Needless to say, the chorus, a repetition of “into the dirt” backed by looped vocals and a stuttering drum machine, could not be a better fit for a song with hands dirtied from looking for earthworms in the ground.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Search for WondLa – Tony DiTerlizzi – “You are from an old land/Crafted out of wet sand/What is it all about?/Staring at your hands…”

“Drop” – Tunde Adebimpe

NEW TUNDE ADEBIMPE JUST DROPPED!! THEE BLACK BOLTZ!! OUT THIS APRIL!! I’m not sure if anything will ever cure the decade-long TV on the Radio drought, but man, a new album from such a fantastic talent sure comes close.

I never got around to writing about “Magnetic,” but it felt so much like TV on the Radio to me—it was distinctly Tunde Adebimpe, but it had that same urgent propulsion that made their indie hits feel ageless. It’s one of those tracks that makes you see how far the footprints of one particular member of a band in their music. TV on the Radio bunched several people together with magic touches into a single band, which is startling, but this touch is unmistakably Adebimpe’s. But “Drop” is where his sound begins to branch out and diverge into something wholly new. It has a flavor that’s simultaneously ’80s and 2010’s indie pop. Once the beatboxing intro fades away, rhythmic as bubbles popping in midair, it becomes a much more relaxed yet introspective dive into Adebimpe’s mind. As the guitars—clean enough to almost sound like synths—radiate into the calm ripple of the track, he grapples with a sensation of awakening; “Drop” couldn’t be a more apt title for a song whose lyrics are steps away from launching off a daunting yet hopeful precipice: “I′m gonna try it for myself/I’m gonna need somebody′s help/Cast an extraordinary spell/And rise into the night.”

Together, “Magnetic” and “Drop” couldn’t make me more excited for the range of Thee Black Boltz. “Magnetic” was a perfect access point for the fans who were wanting something close to TV on the Radio 2: Electric Boogaloo (listen, it’s kind of a self-callout), but “Drop” represents the somewhat uncharted territory that we have yet to see Adebimpe cover fully.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Sound of Stars – Alechia Dow – “We′re gonna feel it when we drop/Let′s go out where the visions never stop/There is a light/There’s a light just beyond this horizon/See it shine and rise into the night…”

“Insomniac” – Echobelly

Generally, the British were absolutely cooking with grease as far as rock music goes from about 1964 on, but there’s something so fruitful about the ’90s to me. If it’s from the period from 1992-1999 and it’s British, there’s a solid 75% chance that I’ll enjoy it. No, wait. Not exclusively the Brits, just because ’90s rock was so good, guys, but I just love the ’90s. To me, 1994 seems a particularly ripe crop of the vast harvest of the decade, especially the Britpop boom of the first half of the ’90s. Three out of the four of Britpop’s Big Four released albums: Blur with Parklife, Oasis (🤢) with Definitely Maybe, and Pulp with His ‘n’ Hers. But even if you look past the big players, 1994 is full of gems—”Insomniac” being one of them.

I just love Britpop, man. God. I talked a bit about Echobelly last year (with “Bellyache,” from this same album, Everybody’s Got One) with their propensity to take the genre’s penchant for social commentary a step further, as well as their much more diverse lineup compared to many Britpop bands of the time. (Not one but TWO women of color in a Britpop band was pretty much unheard of at the time) “Insomniac” is much more radio-friendly, but it embodies the “pop” of the Britpop, but never in a mindless way—more in the way that their contemporaries could wrap commentary in the most delicious guitar hooks. As Sonya Madan sings of her concerningly high subject (“I think we’ve lost control, dear/Whatever turned you on/You put it up your nose, dear”), the guitars absolutely knock you upside the head. You couldn’t wring the pure Britishness out of it if you tried (particularly the way that Madan sings “I swim in circles/In puddles/In trouble and then I go” like it’s a nursery rhyme…on a song about substance abuse), but you couldn’t wring the pure rock n’ roll out of it, either—this is what a hit should be.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea – Maggie Tokuda-Hall – even though Alfie gets a more sympathetic redemption arc in the final book, some of his relentless drug abuse certainly rings close to this song.

“Ride A White Horse” – Goldfrapp

“Ride A White Horse” is about as clean of a song you could get. It’s more than polished—it came out of the womb shinier than a disco ball, and its blinding sheen is made for dancing. Alison Goldfrapp has insisted that the title wasn’t a nod to T. Rex (but sort of was a reference to this), but the two songs couldn’t be further from each other—the dance-pop glamour of this song is about as far as Marc Bolan and company frolicking through the woods, but both have entirely distinct energies that differentiate themselves far beyond their respective choice of animals. Even for something made in 2006, Goldfrapp and Gregory’s work still sounds straight out of a club in the Blade Runner universe. Part of this is why I think the choice of making the music video for “Ride A White Horse” the epitome of dirty is kind of genius fit—it’s such a sanitized song, and yet Alison Goldfrapp sings it against superimposed backdrops of rotting food waste with scraps of toilet paper stuck to her heels, not to mention the cameo from what appears to be the proto-Trash Man. Even when there’s flies buzzing off of it, the polish of it never fades.

Also, because this popped up when I looked this up on YouTube, here’s a bit of unexpectedly delightful Goldfrapp content:

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick – as much as I disliked this book, I can’t deny that it fits the atmosphere—more so of the movies, as I said before.

“We Got the Power” (feat. Jehnny Beth) – Gorillaz

In retrospect, it was probably a terrible idea to listen to Humanz for the first time mere days before the inauguration just because of the album’s conception. When telling Pusha T, one of the album’s plentiful collaborators, what the atmosphere of the album was, Damon Albarn described it as “a party for the end of the world if Trump wins.” Not only did he say this well before Trump was elected, but…well, y’know. We all know the mess we’re in. Humanz often gets lambasted by the fandom as their worst album. I wouldn’t say it’s bad, but I think it’s the nexus of modern Gorillaz, which is to say that it’s the point where their albums became increasingly devoted to their collaborators as opposed to the creative force of Albarn and Hewlett. Said collaborators are hit or miss, but most of the songs have a verse by Albarn with the exact same filter over his voice once the collaborators have had their place in the sun. Much as I love my guy Damon, it got slightly tiring after about 10 songs. But if it’s a party for the Trump-era hellscape, Humanz fulfills its purpose with flying colors, balancing social commentary with gloriously catchy pop songs. I feel like the thesis is perfectly encapsulated by Vince Staples’ chorus on “Ascension”: “The sky is falling, baby/Drop that ass before it crash.”

In spite of all that, the album ends on an anthemic note—”We Got The Power.” As simple as the lyrics are, simplicity is what this track needs. In times so overwhelmed with shock, horror, and doom, sometimes a more concise message is the best thing to cut through the noise. “We got the power to be loving each other/No matter what happens.” IT’S TRUE! It’s why “All You Need Is Love” has endured for so long. It’s simple, but it’s the kind of uniting message that we needed. If anyone should know that, with their history of cleverly packaged social commentary, it’s Gorillaz. Albarn is joined by Jehnny Beth (if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard Jehnny Beth sing a French verse on a British band’s song, I’d have two nickels, etc., etc.) and an uncredited Noel Gallagher. I briefly mentioned it before it, but as much of an Oasis hater as I am, it really is beautiful that they were able to set aside the stupidest possible differences, realize how stupid they were, and join forces on a song about loving each other. You can’t not appreciate it. (To say nothing of Liam…) And as the closing track to an album about a party at the end of democracy, it’s a welcome light at the end of the tunnel, and a true light—it’s not the flashing club lights that shroud the fear of most of the album, but a real lodestar.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Stardust Grail – Yume Kitasei – “And we dream of home, I dream of life out of here/Their dreams are small/My dreams don’t know fear/I got my heart full of hope/I will change everything/No matter what I’m told…”

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 Books

A Reading List for the Coming Four Years | Books for Rising, Resisting, and Keeping the Hope

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Monday, bibliophiles…sort of. We’re in for a long four years.

It’s already been said what a slap in the face it is to have Trump sworn in on the day we normally set aside to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr., one of America’s preeminent champions of civil rights. (I’m sure the administration will find some way to spin it in their favor, the same way that Trump spun the Women’s March. Eurgh.) I’m grieving. I will continue to grieve, so long as our country is once again helmed by a tyrant who uplifts the wealthy and bigoted while the marginalized are squashed underfoot. My processing this won’t end until we get him out of office (because I refuse to believe that this is the end), and that’s okay.

But today, as with most of the activity on this blog, I’d like to talk about books.

Anyone who has even had a semblance of a pulse on the news in the last five years or so has seen the increased hateful rhetoric surrounding books—particularly those concerned with promoting diverse voices. Mass book bans have swept the country, with everything from the most innocuous picture books to critical feminist knowledge being stricken down across the board, all in the name of “protecting the children.” The process of objecting to a book is frighteningly simple and straightforward, leading to bans on the basis of misinformation—just look at the time Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb was challenged after a single complaint…and attributed to Oprah Winfrey (ah, yes, because all Black women are the same person, apparently). Apologies for the strong language here, but to quote a great button that I have on one of my jackets, “you know these fuckers banning books don’t read shit.” It’s true. Rarely do those in charge of banning, especially those in the highest offices in the country, consider the actual contents of the books—they simply get a whiff of anything that smells to them of D.E.I. or the “woke groomer agenda” and try to smite it out of the public consciousness.

It was never about the children. The majority of the books that are being banned to “protect children” aren’t even aimed at children. And even if they are, it’s only for superficial reasons—inclusions of, god forbid, diverse perspectives (LGBTQ+, POC, disabled, etc.) or acknowledgments that maybe, just maybe, America is not perfect and has never been perfect. It truly is dangerous. We’ve seen how the Trump campaign was built on twisting and exaggerating lies about this country, feeding its supporters that we must go back to some nonexistent, golden age. Of course it never existed, but the way that they do it is by blocking off access to information on all levels—perpetuating lies and attacking those who spread the truth. Book bans are how this is done at the largest level; it starts with the very youngest, and they claim to “protect the children” as they restrict their access to learning about how this country—and the world—truly is. The regimes that put blinders on its populations—especially the ones banning or burning books—never land on the right side of history.

I believe that the best way that you can combat this deliberate shielding of the truth is to read. In a world where the ruling class relies on you being complacent enough to accept their lies as fact, reading is the ultimate form of rebellion. We read to learn: about other kinds of living, other kinds of people, and possibilities in the imaginations of people you know nothing about. Literature is the site of change because it shows us this possibility—if you can imagine an alternative world, you can put it into action. When you feel powerless, remember that you have boundless knowledge at your fingertips.

So I’ve compiled this reading list for anyone looking to rebel. I’ve gathered books of all age levels and from all kinds of diverse voices that Trump and his cronies would have you believe neither matter nor exist. Whether your stance is to directly fight the power or quietly rebel by imagining a way out, there are books here for you. Fiction and nonfiction, here are the tools you need to combat misinformation, bigotry, and hatred—and have a great read, too.

A READING LIST FOR THE COMING FOUR YEARS | Books for Rising, Resisting, and Keeping the Hope

FOR THE FIGHT:

These are the books about resistance, in the real world and in imagined worlds. If you need the motivation to stand up and fight for your rights and the encouragement to not pull punches when doing so, these are the books for you.

FOR A BETTER TOMORROW:

Here is something I want to emphasize going forward: it’s important to fight, but not all of us have the strength to do so—and that’s okay! Plenty of people aren’t ready to get out into the streets, and we need to respect that perspective. (This is coming from someone who isn’t quite ready either.) What we need the most in these times is hope, and though there is injustice in these books, they present stories where, despite hardships, joy prevails. They also present vital alternatives to the now—one of the most powerful ways of resisting, in my opinion, is to have the ability to imagine a better tomorrow, whether it’s alternate history, the distant future, or simply a kinder present.

FOR KNOWLEDGE:

The best way to combat misinformation is to inform yourself. Here are some of my favorite nonfiction books about resistance and feminism and its many facets—race, sexuality, gender, ability, and more. Ranging from revered feminist scholars to more contemporary perspectives, I hope there is something for everybody here.

A SELECTION OF GREAT BOOKS BANNED FOR RIDICULOUS REASONS:

Here in the U.S., we’ve seen a deeply disheartening uptick in book bans for a number of reasons—none of them valid. Standing up to book bans is essential in these times, and through it, you can discover some excellent literature, whether they’re classics like Maus and The Bluest Eye or newcomers like The Poet X.

RESOURCES FOR FIGHTING AGAINST CENSORSHIP:

  • PEN America – if you’ve been paying attention to efforts against book banning, you’ve likely seen PEN America come up, and for good reason—they are one of the foremost organizations fighting for the rights of authors and journalists, as well as the freedom to read and write.
  • Authors Against Book Bans – self-explanatory, but this organization has a variety of resources on how you can fight against book bans around the country.
  • M.K. England (Substack) – although my list didn’t end up containing any of their books (sorry 😬), England has provided a comprehensive list of ways you can fight back against the potential threat of Project 2025 in terms of queer literature for younger (MG and YA) audiences.
  • SUPPORT! YOUR! LOCAL! LIBRARY! Wherever you are in this country, use as many of your library’s resources as you can! Whether you’re checking out books physically or digitally, or using their non-book services, libraries need all the support that they can get in these coming years.

That being said, this list is by no means exhaustive! I encourage you to look beyond this list to find even more books you love that live up to these principles. Scour the internet and your local library, and you are sure to find many more examples. Let me know in the comments what your favorite books about making change, resisting, and keeping hope are!

Today’s song:

it’s a relevant song for this post, but also, I did just listen to Humanz for the first time over the weekend. Not their best, but this was one of the highlights; as much as I despise Oasis, I do find it poetic that Albarn and Noel Gallagher sang together on this one after having the most ridiculous, decades-long rivalry. (To say nothing of Liam…)

That’s it for this post! Have a wonderful day, and…I know I put this at the end of every post, but please take care of yourselves. I love you.

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 1/5/25

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles, and happy near year!

First post and the first Sunday Songs of 2025! No pressure. This week: new verses on new songs, new(ish) takes on old(er) songs, and…oh, god, Eric, please put your shirt back on—

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 1/5/25

“POP POP POP (feat. Danny Brown)” – IDLES

Dread it…run from it…TANGK always arrives. One of the best albums of 2024, hands down. I already talked about “POP POP POP” back in March, but at the end of the year, IDLES added one more flourish to an already excellent track—a guest feature by Danny Brown. Of course, I say that knowing next to nothing about Danny Brown up until this point, but the spin he and IDLES put on one of the most prominent highlights of TANGK is an interesting one—and catchy, too. In places, the beat has been treated like an accordion, stretched out in some areas and compressed in others—the final, spoken-word monologue has been sped up, while the first five seconds are jumpstarted, recreating the static of plugging a guitar amp in. Meanwhile, Brown’s guest verse hurtles at breakneck speed; For me, there are some lines that come across rather corny (“On the surface/Looks like a circus/All these clowns around, pull the curtain”). However, at the very end, Brown’s lyrics align with the ethos of “POP POP POP” in the first place: an assertion of purpose, that purpose being staying true to yourself, spreading love, and being a source of protection for others. The final line sums it up nicely: “Took a couple wrong turns/Don’t know right from left/But found my way to the home that I strayed/And now I say everything is okay.” Can “POP POP POP” ever be improved? I highly doubt it, but I also doubt that this was meant to be an improvement—it’s more the kicking around with a preexisting idea with other collaborators, and in that experimentation, it creates an exciting take on one of the 2024’s best songs.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Forever Is Now – Mariama J. Lockington – “Searching for something you cannot hide/Looked in the wrong place, but should search inside/Relied on things that just let me down
But now I see what its really ’bout…”

“Sugar in the Tank” – Julien Baker & TORRES

Personally, I’ve never quite gotten on board with the queer cowboy aesthetic, but I can respect how queer people have been taking it back. In the first place, I think any kind of cowboy mythos attracts the kind of people who want to forge their own trails and make their own way without the constraints of society, a Venn diagram that seems to attract, strangely enough, both conservative people wanting to go back to “traditional values” and queer people who see an out from heteronormative culture. Growing up in the mountains, my association with much of it came from the former, even in our fairly liberal town (I say fairly liberal because there was the odd confederate flag or “if you’re reading this, you’re in range” sign on someone’s house). But I don’t mind seeing a bedazzled cowboy hat or a boygenius photoshoot out in the desert every now and then. Evidently, I’m too much of a city slicker.

The reclamation of country by queer people has gone in much the same way, and I’ve never been one for country in the first place (same association as above), but what I will give a try 8 or 9 times out of 10 is anything that Julien Baker is involved in. Now here’s an example of queer cowboy/country reclamation done right: nothing better than two lesbians making a song with a title referring to slang for an effeminate man and turning it into something positive and sensual. Musically, there’s twang aplenty, but at least for me, Baker’s talent screams at you like a neon sign—she’s whipped out the banjo once more, and it contrasts with the hazy overdrive that TORRES has applied to her excellent guitar work. The boygenius fan is me is more partial to how Baker’s harmonies fit with Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, but it’s clear that she’s well-matched with TORRES, musically and vocally. I’m not 100% on board with the more country direction—it’s more on the alt-country side, but very much country-sounding—but I’ll give it a chance for Baker.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Road to Ruin – Hana Lee – will something close to post-apocalyptic, biker cowboys suffice?

“Man Research (Clapper)” – Gorillaz

I remembered this track after getting into “Bill Murray” a few weeks ago; as wonderful an album as Gorillaz is, I often find myself forgetting about some of the songs sandwiched in the middle; this one has the job of following up “Clint Eastwood,” and with how many tidal waves that classic made in the early 2000’s, any track following that up, like “Bill Murray” and “Feel Good, Inc.,” has an exceedingly hard act to follow. But in much the same way as “Bill Murray” brings down the tempo but keeps the creativity, “Man Research (Clapper)” provides a bridge between some of the more energetic heavy-hitters—“Punk” comes up right after it. Buoyed by a sample from Raymond Scott’s instrumental piece “In The Hall of the Mountain Queen” (delightful, honestly—feels like the title screen music for an ’80s video game and not in a cheesy way), it’s dominated by the rasping repetitions of Damon Albarn pushing his higher vocals to their limits—maybe there’s the excuse for why I forgot about it. A good portion is just him going “yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah,” but that’s the mark of a great musician—sure, he’s just going “yeah yeah yeah” in front of a sample and some record scratches, but I eat it up every time. There’s a smooth cohesion to his craft that makes every separate element seem as though this song is their final form, their ultimate destiny to be brought together.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Chameleon Moon – RoAnna Sylver – I picked this one more for the atmosphere than the lyrics—a similar kind of hazy and raspy energy, but with an undercurrent of vitality.

“The Slide” (Tall Dwarfs cover) – Shayne Carter

Some covers prove that the singer understands some part of the song more than the original creators. Not to front on Chris Knox, incredibly talented and oddball songwriters as he is, but Shayne Carter’s cover gets to the heart of what Knox and co. were going for as far as the tone and the emotion of the lyrics.

Tall Dwarfs aren’t going to be anything but jangly, and their original version of “The Slide” is no exception. It’s got a psychedelic, ’60s sway to it, faintly sunny…and then you get to the lyrics. And then you get the whiplash from hearing those upbeat guitars against the lyrics: “The doctors should kill/She’s terminally ill.” I’m sorry, WHAT? I’m not saying that songs can’t have lyrics that don’t match the mood of their music, but in this case, Shayne Carter’s interpretation does the song more justice. In contrast to Knox’s upbeat instrumentals, Carter employs solemn pianos, muted strums of an acoustic guitar, and an electronic drone that begins to circle around you at the 1:58 mark as you listen like vultures circling carrion. The acoustics sound like they were recorded at 3 a.m. in an abandoned gym with walls covered in mold. That atmosphere captures how disturbing the lyrics are—sparsely told, it recounts the experience of an 80-year-old, terminally ill woman wasting away in an institution. That cold, chilling echo gives the song a much more tangible setting and emotional depth; the spareness of it all makes the setting so much more unforgivable, with its featureless walls and constant chill in the air. That Radiohead-like, droning dread comes about as close as I would imagine to capturing that imprisoned, monotonous feeling of your mind slip away and being powerless to do anything about it, all the while surrounded by nurses who barely want to be there. It’s a tragedy of a song—it was written in the 1990’s, and while I’m sure conditions have somewhat improved for patients, these situations are a reality for so many people, whether or not they have control of their minds. The pen that Chris Knox and co. put to paper was a respectful and sympathetic one, but Shayne Carter deserves so much praise for how much his musical interpretation brought out the original sentiment—and made it even more emotional.

Sadly, it’s a story that partially came true for Chris Knox; he suffered a stroke in 2009, and has had a limited vocabulary ever since. He’s made a handful of public appearances and performances in the last decade or so, but he’s largely off the radar these days. However, “The Slide,” alongside many more of his covers from both his solo work and of Tall Dwarfs, were compiled on Stroke: Songs for Chris Knox in order to initially help his family pay the medical bills. I hoped that he hadn’t accidentally predicted his own fate with “The Slide,” but it seems that his family has been going to great lengths to make sure he’s taken care of. Even amidst the horrors he described, there are bright spots worth celebrating—namely, the love of family and friends during unpredictable situations such as his.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Spirit Bares Its Teeth – Andrew Joseph White – the institutions in this novel are different than the one in the song, but it’s just as oppressive—and deeply haunting and eerie.

“You’re Too Weird” – Fruit Bats

…okay! Going into this, I didn’t expect to be that well-acquainted with Eric Johnson’s chest hair while he stared longingly into my eyes, but here we are? 😀 Don’t think I needed all that…thank you Eric, very cool

Either way, it’s all part of the ’80s-parodying cheese of the music video, complete with mullets, long pearl necklaces, everyone’s hair being artfully blown by an invisible fan, and even a keytar. The best part is that every single band member is fully leaning into the cheese, with every band member hamming it up whenever the camera is on them. If I can erase the strategic view of said chest hair via Johnson’s unbuttoned shirt, “You’re Too Weird” is a great little indie track; Johnson has one of the more distinctive voices in indie music that I can think of, and he takes it to some of its extremes, hitting higher notes than I’d expect even from him. Like the ’80s music and videos that “You’re Too Weird” takes cues from, it’s an endlessly catchy love song, peppered by a tasteful guitar solo and tambourine here and there. I’ll have to bring this back once the weather gets warmer—it’s the perfect song for staring out the car window on a summer evening.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

If You Still Recognize Me – Cynthia So – “They say that I’m not supposed to be in love with you/They say that you’re too weird for me/And you’ll leave eventually/But then I’m the only one who ever believed in you…”

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

That’s it for the first Sunday Songs of the year! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 12/22/24

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

Before I begin, here are the Sunday Songs from the past two weeks, as I had to crawl my way through finals hell and didn’t have time to write here. As with Hounds of Love, I PROMISE that I’ll end up talking about Before and After Science: Ten Pictures someday, because that album is spectacular. In the meantime…

12/8/24:

12/15/24 (or, “I haven’t seen Priscilla, I’ve just seen Suki Waterhouse’s episode of What’s in My Bag“):

This week: I didn’t intend for a) my color scheme to line up with the trans flag or b) the cover of this week’s Book Review Tuesday, but trans rights. Obviously.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 12/22/24

“Well Well Well” – Le Tigre

There’s nothing like looking through YouTube comments on this video and slowly piecing together that there was some kind of huge argument under them circa 2008 that, because of it being so far back, is impossible to trace the beginning or end of because the reply function gets weird to track after 10 years or so. Not to be defeatist about these things, but it seems that so long as there arises new technology, humans will find a way to use them to engage in pointless arguments. Given the band, there’s probably some butthurt republican of yesteryear at the end of it, but the point still stands. (But also, who the hell goes into a Le Tigre song and thinks “ah, yes, this will align with my conservative views?”)

Le Tigre is going to prove a vital wellspring to tap into for the next four years or so. In these dark times, we look to the gospel of Kathleen Hanna. (Also to my mom, who was the one who remembered “Well Well Well” in the first place). This is one of the songs where Le Tigre’s switch from Bikini Kill’s guitars to synths makes perfect sense—it’s a song of going through the motions, not unlike a machine. Hanna and Johanna Fateman deliver the lyrics with all of the enthusiasm of reading an instruction manual: “Well, what do you like/And what do you need?/How should I act/And who should I be?” Never have I heard a song so delightful in its over-the-top performance of being perfunctory: there’s no pleasure to any of it.

Which brings me to the subject matter—given some of the subtle (and not so subtle) sexual references in the music video (which was incredibly made, so kudos to Elisabeth Subrin and her direction), there’s an overtone of women being expected to exist only to please men, especially when sex is concerned. It’s all about men’s pleasure, and as with the lyrics, there’s no regard of what the woman wants—it’s all just “What, where, when, how, when, who?” on the woman’s part. Even if, sadly, that one Ben Shapiro tweet is fake (we all know that the sentiment behind it is probably true), even now women are expected to always be receptive, anticipate of every single need of men, and exist only to fulfill their needs. Obviously, it extends far beyond sex and into any aspect of life, as any woman or AFAB person knows all too well. That’s part of the genius of Subrin’s music video—aside from the fact that the fonts and animations are gloriously early-2000’s, the corporate atmosphere of it does capture the restriction of being under those patriarchal expectations: going through the motions and constantly awaiting another mindless task that brings you no pleasure. Genius.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Luis Ortega Survival Club – Sonora Reyes – the story of an entitled boy who thinks that he can get away with anything—and the students who push back against his chauvinist actions.

“this is my california” – mary in the junkyard

A promise for the new year, or at least for the next few weeks: this is not the last you’ll be hearing of mary in the junkyard here on The Bookish Mutant. The band name (who’s mary and why’s she in the junkyard?) was what originally grabbed me, but discovering them turned out to be those once-in-a-blue moon finds—they combine a reverence for 90’s alt-rock with an artsy sensibility that’s distinctly 21st century, unafraid of letting their melodies collapse like a crushed-tin can and reform as an entirely different creature. They’re good. They’re the product of a collapse of sorts—founding members Clari Freeman-Taylor and David Allison were originally part of Second Thoughts, a band that found success on TikTok but grew increasingly stifled by the music that made them popular. Their move? Break up, switch around some members, and start anew.

“this is my california” is one of their gentler, more restrained efforts (you’ll see what I mean next week…stay tuned), but even their restraint feels fresh somehow. I’ve pinpointed several comparisons for mary in the junkyard, but the one that immediately comes to mind for this track is Luna. From the easygoing, sidewalk-ambling pace to the warm pulsation to guitars to…well, you can’t blame them for the California part. It doesn’t help that “this is my california” rings close to “California (All the Way),” but it doesn’t feel like a rip-off—in fact, that wide body of songs about California makes the pairing enhance the lyrics. Freeman-Taylor has never been to California, but described it in an interview with Northern Transmissions as “a paradise or idea of success that didn’t really resonate with me.” Her California, as it I’m sure it is for hundreds of people, owing to Hollywood and its side effects, is an ideality, but one that’s just out of reach—”My dream/Comes from the pale light of a bright blue screen.”

It feels like a critical part of growing up and realizing that your lifestyle doesn’t align with what you once thought it did. You’re stuck in that place and think that you’re the only one feeling this way, but you realize that the path before you is even clearer than before. That image of California is a place for other people’s dreams, but not yours—there’s a physical distance, too. Certainly fits with that separation from the earlier sound they were boxed into before forming this band. These lines sounded wistful to me at first, and there’s plenty of wist to go around, but one of the last ones sounds more liberatory now than anything: “If you go to California/We will not stay in touch/I’ve never been to California/And I will keep it as such.” I feel this song echoing through me in every transition—getting away from my middle school classmates in high school, then realizing in college that my high school classmates wanted a different kind of college lifestyle than I did and forging my own path. Not everybody needs California. Lots of natural disasters and whatnot.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Where You See Yourself – Claire Forrest – diverging from other people’s expectations, but also the ones you’ve set for yourself.

“Memories” – White Poppy

If anyone on this Earth is deserving of being named Crystal, I think it’s a musician who makes a song like this. Her name is Crystal Dorval, and I really, really wish I remembered how I discovered her song, for the life of me. It was all a haze. I realize I’m talking like an aging stoner recounting the sixties. But no, it was the COVID lockdown, and to this day, I’ve never touched drugs of any kind, unless you count coffee. I floated from album to album, song to song, not quite absorbing all of them, but all of them sticking to me anyway. “Memories” is one such artifact from that time. I don’t remember where I found it, but it sticks—unpainfully and untainted thankfully—as a distinctly May 2020-or-thereabouts artifact.

“Memories” is one of those rare songs where the feel of the song, the album title and the album cover collide to create the most cohesive picture of the music possible; the pale blue and pink filter on the cover, combined with a lens flare that punctures the image of a person walking down a bridge into a forest, is as rippling and light as the music itself—Paradise Gardens is the name of the album, and, very likely, where that bridge leads. (Was this what George Bluth Sr. was missing all along?) As crystalline as Crystal Dorval’s name, “Memories” twinkles along in a dreamlike haze, untethered save for the thick baseline keeping it anchored. Even that anchor ripples with the rest of the glimmering, the edges blurred along with Dorval’s echoing vocals, which do sound like the whispers echoing from inside of a glittering geode split open. It took me until my Cocteau Twins summer to bridge the gap, but if you’re searching for something close to a modern analogue, look no further. Nobody can top them, of course, but Dorval has most certainly attended the Liz Frazer School of Dreamlike Music. I suspect the reason that she didn’t get a perfect score was because her lyrics are decipherable and have a concrete meaning. Either way, if you need to drift off for four minutes and five seconds, climb aboard.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Stardust Grail – Yume Kitasei – the album cover for Paradise Gardens, as well as the dreamy feel of the music, ripples in a similar way to how I imagined Auncle’s chromatophores. I promise it makes sense.

“Bill Murray” – Gorillaz

The joys of being a fan of a band with a treasure trove of B-Sides (or D-Sides, I should say) never end. It’s intimidating to see two whole albums of B-Sides from Gorillaz in particular, but if anything positive can be said about the Apple Music algorithm, it reminds me that they exist.

Being the B-Side for “Feel Good Inc.” has to be the worst job in the world for a song. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it. When I say that “Bill Murray” is an afterthought, I don’t mean it in a derogatory way at all. It does feel distinctly like a B-Side, but some songs are meant to be B-Sides—products from restless minds that were never meant to be center stage, but create a more nuanced picture of what came out of their famously fruitful sessions. Even the title is a bit of an afterthought—the lyrics aren’t much to go off of, but Jamie Hewlett suggested the name off the cuff after seeing his name in a magazine while discussing the song with Damon Albarn. Even though it only came to fruition during Demon Days, it traces its origins back to 1999, for the recording of Gorillaz’s self titled album. “Bill Murray” screams Phase 1, and that’s what so charming about it to me—Albarn’s wistful vocals, backed by The Bees, call back to the plaintive high notes of “Man Research (Clapper),” while the easygoing rhythm could fit right in with “Slow Country.” Had it been sandwiched between, say, “Sound Check (Gravity)” and “Double Bass,” it could have been a smooth transition—a temporary cooldown for an album brimming with energy. But on its own, “Bill Murray” proves that even the songs that Gorillaz cast aside in its early days were constructed with nothing but passion and intricacy.

As I said, even Gorillaz’s afterthoughts had plenty of polishing up on their own. Here’s an extra from the special edition of Bananaz, where you can see Albarn, Hewlett, and The Bees recording this song, complete with the usual antics (and chicken noises).

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Full Speed to a Crash Landing – Beth Revis – “Bill Murray” seems right at home in the atmosphere of this novella—even amidst all of the climactic space opera machinations, Ada has time to quip and slip into her easygoing personality.

“A Bowl and A Pudding” – Wilco

Cousin, huh? It truly is the gift that keeps on giving. As full of hidden miracles as Cruel Country was, I think I’ll side with Cousin at the end of the day if we’re picking sides as far as 2020’s Wilco albums. (But why pit two Tweedys against each other?)

The more Cousin reveals itself to me, the more the album art makes sense. The original art is a photograph by sculptor Makoto Azura; this piece is Frozen Flowers 2023, and it’s one of his many botanical sculptures, many of which are frozen and propped into snowy landscapes. As much of a visual learner as I am, his sculptures immediately draw me to the sense of touch; with every separate flower frozen into its neighbor, I can imagine the ridges of icicles under my fingertips, of the curve of each individual petal and leaf as they were compressed into coldness. It’s so befitting of Cousin because the whole album is an exercise in textures. As with each individual shade of the vibrant botanicals in the sculpture, unique sounds blister and twirl next to each other, from the ear-popping cacophony (and possible all-time album opener, for me) “Infinite Surprise” to the dusty dewdrop softness of “Sunlight Ends.”

“A Bowl and A Pudding” was one of the Cousin tracks that flew under the radar for me. The bar was unreasonably high after some of the tracks that I mentioned, as well as “Pittsburgh.” No skips, the more I think about it, and this track adds to that pantheon. In comparison to some of the more in-your-face textures on the album, this song is more understated; it’s more of the woolen fibers of a sweater or the gentle trickle of water after you’ve left the faucet running by mistake. It’s softly cyclical. The acoustic guitar notes swallow themselves, the fingerpicking as gentle as sunlight through a window. Tweedy’s lyrics are similarly cyclical, every one parroting the other in whispers, laying bare the dissolution of a relationship. That calmness makes the title feel like a still life. It’s up to you whether the bowl and the pudding are two separate items or if the pudding is in the bowl by design…or maybe that’s the point of the lyrics. Is it? Is the togetherness of the bowl and the pudding meant to reflect the separation and alienation that Tweedy narrates as someone he loved slips away from him? The bowl loves the pudding because it fills up the empty space that was molded to hold something. The pudding loves the bowl for the security, but does the pudding want something more? Can it be contained? Is the pudding in question the kind that is even served in a bowl in the first place? Is the bowl sick of being created solely as a vessel to hold other things?

Oh, god. Got too English major with it. A note to my parents: I guess this means that my degree is going to good use?

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Feeling of Falling in Love – Mason Deaver – “I can tell/How long this night is gonna be/And the one you love/Is not 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 Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 2/25/24

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

Took me this long to get to a blue period…it didn’t happened until almost three months in the year, but of course it’s the one that ends up having Faith No More and Kermit the Frog in the same breath. Duality of Madeline.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 2/25/24

“House of Self-Undoing” – Chelsea Wolfe

In an outcome that should be surprising to no one, Chelsea Wolfe’s new record, She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She, absolutely rocks. Dare I say it might be one of her best albums in years? Birth of Violence was a solid album, but I remember it having some lulls, but then again, I haven’t listen to it since its release in 2019. I haven’t listened to her entire discography, but I’ve never met a Chelsea Wolfe album I didn’t like, but there are some that nudge their way past the others to the tidal wave of goth revelry that she’s come to be known for. I’ve meant to review at least a handful of the excellent singles that came out of this album, but I remember specifically that “Whispers In The Echo Chamber” came out at a time when I got unexpectedly swamped…when there were a bunch of fantastic blue songs I wanted to talk about. Oopsie. No time like the present, amirite?

In terms of themes, Wolfe always has something poetic up her sleeve, whether she’s making the skeleton of her album out of Jungian analysis or Tarot. They’re all deeply personal, but She Reaches feels more intimately so; here, she grapples with separation of all kinds: from past relationships, from present systems, and from future pathways that her life could lead her down. But as she’s draining the gore of all the past messiness out of her system, she’s burning bridges and building her new phoenix of a self out of the charred remains. Back to “Whispers In The Echo Chamber,” where she declares “this world was not designed for us,” (GO OFF QUEEN), whispering like a mysterious necromancer into the ear of the magic-oblivious king. The album finishes on “Dusk” and its promises of “Watch[ing] this empire as it burns and dissipates/Haunted, on fire, on the wings that we create” (GO OFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF), with Wolfe finally detaching herself from this lowly, undeserving mortal plane, and giving a final, cold look to us mortals before disintegrating into a cloud of vampire bats. God, I love her. With such stacked competition, I was grasping for a real favorite on the album, but I cannot stop coming back to “House of Self-Undoing.” After the triumphant declaration of independence in “Whispers,” the second track finds Wolfe extricating herself from the turmoil that she sought to free herself from (“In the house of self-undoing/I saw your face”). Most of the heavier tracks on She Reaches are heavy in the way of Wolfe’s goth dark theatricality and billowing cloaks, but “House of Self-Undoing” is pure rock, grinding with percussion like speeding footsteps and guitars smoother than hotel bedsheets. There’s a nervous, frantic energy that claws its way out of every note, just as Wolfe’s lyrics point to, as the boldness of separation gives way to the physicality of fleeing the old and bursting into the new. It’s the journey of clawing up through the earth and spitting out the dirt in your mouth, before your caked fingernails break the surface to find the sunlight.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #1) – Tamsyn Muir – as much of a disappointment Harrow the Ninth turned out to be, I can’t deny how fun this book was. The general underworld/undead imagery is already fitting enough, but the themes of separation from a past life are the icing on the cake.

“Midlife Crisis” – Faith No More

The only proper way to describe “Midlife Crisis” is something along the lines of a feat of acrobatics. There’s so many twists, turns, and midair flips that this song executes one after the other that just makes you wonder about the mad scientist’s lab that it was surely cooked up in, because surely something bizarre and outside of human comprehension went into polishing this track to a shine. God, it just goes so hard.

Like Post, “Midlife Crisis,” over 30 years after its release, sounds like everything and nothing, but in this case, what a decent portion of the world of hard rock took from Mike Patton’s vocal acrobatics and spit out was…nu metal. Jesus. Urgh. I’ll dispense from my rant about why nu metal gets on my nerves since it’s more of a personal vendetta than one that has any kind of logical basis (listen, you try and do 50 push-ups at Tae Kwon Do while Linkin Park is blasting through the speakers), but they would’ve had nothing if not for this song. You can hear exactly where Korn got their Cookie Monster gibberish-vocals from on a single go-around on this song. What sets Mike Patton apart from them, however, is the range that he crams into these astounding four minutes; you’ve got said grimy Cookie Monster vocals, but just as quickly, he turns a corner into a soaring smoothness that makes you wonder if somebody slipped him the world’s most powerful cough drop in the time it took him to switch over. Going from those kinds of extremes so quickly and seemingly without breaking a sweat…if that’s not talent, I don’t know what is. And the scorn that this song radiates—”You’re perfect, yes, it’s true/But without me, you’re only you.” DAMN. Also, for the longest time, I thought that the line afterwards was “you’re menstruating hard” and not “your menstruating heart,” which…yeah, the actual line makes much more sense, but somehow, I feel like Patton seems like the type of guy to just say a line like “YOU’RE MENSTRUATING HARD 🗣🗣🗣🗣” with that delivery out of the blue. It was ’90s hard rock. Somehow, it works. Faith No More struck gold with this gift of a song, for sure.

…and I haven’t even gotten to the synth breakdown at 2:22. Good lord. Speaks for itself, really.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Invisible Things – Mat Johnson – scorn, grime and polish in equal measure, and a bunch of alien abductees recreating Trump-era American in a bubble city on Europa. Time to party, right?

“Sweepstakes” (feat. Mos Def & The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble) – Gorillaz

I meant to talk more about Plastic Beach back in December when I first listened to it, but I can’t not come back to it, like most Gorillaz albums that I’ve listened to in full. (Maybe not Song Machine. Like…half of Song Machine. And not Cracker Island. Okay, the first three Gorillaz albums.) Besides being a sweeping showcase of both Albarn’s overflowing musical talent and the storytelling about a tech-invaded future and rampant consumerism, Plastic Beach, I think, is the first album that cemented their reputation for having a continuously stacked list of guest artists. I sincerely doubt that there will ever be another band to have Snoop Dogg, the surviving members of The Clash, and Lou Reed on the same album, and that’s not even because Lou Reed is no longer with us. The minute that I found out that there was a song that had both De La Soul and Gruff Rhys from Super Furry Animals on it, my soul just about left my body. There’s just no band quite like Gorillaz in the way they can unite and fuse genres and appeal to so many without selling their souls. I fully believe that Gorillaz are the people’s band. The arty people like them. The pretentious music nerds like them. The jocks like them. The alt people like them. I have a distinct memory of these two bros in my senior year chem class going through their Spotify, and then one of them declared “BRO, THIS IS OUR SONG,” and I fully expected something absolutely rancid, but no. It was “Dare.” DARE. Gorillaz is one of the few bands that have something for everybody, and not in the way that people say that they like “every genre” of music. Albarn’s many strengths in this part of his life hasn’t just been the varied influences that he brings to his music, but the way that he gives them a chance to have their say—Gorillaz is an amalgam of so many gems from so many places, and yet, save for some of their newer albums, hardly any of it doesn’t feel like them.

Onto “Sweepstakes.” This is one of the two Mos Def features on Plastic Beach (the other being “Stylo,” which was incredible live, by the way), and I’m frankly baffled that this one doesn’t get the attention that some of the other tracks on the album do. I’d risk it all to see this one live, especially if they actually bring out Mos Def and the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble onstage. In the video above, Mos Def comes out in…basically an Abraham Lincoln getup, if we count the beard, announcing prizes like a slick auctioneer, before launching into the truly charged, energy-pumped vibrations of this song. Energized is the only word you can ascribe to this song, really. From the beginning, the drum machine thrums a beat that hiccups so deliberately that you can’t help but start jumping. Bringing these three creative forces together on the song was the perfect recipe for a classic—Albarn’s penchant for engineering iconic dance beats, Mos Def’s commanding gravitas that he brings to each lyric, and the creeping, tidal force of the Brass Ensemble as the joyous, urgent burst of horns emerge from the curtain of synths like the chestburster clawing its way out of Kane’s body. It’s a song that begs to be heard, meant to be blasted down the streets in waves of confetti and marching feet—and that’s not just because of the brass that commands the latter half of the song. And for a song about mindless consumerism, exploitation and the duping of the working class by the rich (“‘Who’s the winner?’ Said the dealer/Every player, ‘Yeah, me'”), the infectious triumph is the most intentional thing about this track. Only fitting that The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble’s track “War” would be used for the Hunger Games movies only a few years after this. You’re a winner!

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Prime Meridian – Silvia Moreno-Garcia – telling the working class that they can do anything they set their heart to while the ruling class ignores them completely and colonizes Mars, anyone? Sound familiar?

…oh, wait. Damn.

“1000 Umbrellas” – XTC

Guess I just can’t stop listening to XTC, huh? In case you were wondering (because you totally were, I’m sure), “The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead” continues to have me in an unbreakable chokehold, but this one is good competition.

’60s inspiration can be found in almost any XTC song you can pull out of a jar, even if you ignore The Dukes of Stratosphear, which were just them under another name marketed as a “lost find” of the ’60s (and then ended up outselling any of their XTC records…ouch). For me, “1000 Umbrellas” immediately screams The Beatles, specifically in 1967—somewhere between Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour. It’s pure theatre; even if the album, Skylarking, wasn’t a vague concept album, it practically begs for some kind of dramatic performance. Can’t you just imagine a scene of an aerial view of a bunch of pedestrians holding umbrellas in the rain, and Andy Partridge right smack in the middle of them, lamenting the loss of love as the rain pours down on him? Maybe the umbrellas morph into those pastel, spinning teacup rides as Patridge sings “And one million teacups/I bet couldn’t hold all the wet/That fell out of my eyes/When you fell out with me?” I particularly love how the orchestral arrangements seem to rise and fall, tilting just barely out of neatness and into delirium as Partridge wails, stumbling right along with the beleaguered strings section. On the heels of “Ballet for a Rainy Day,” the rain turns from the kiss of spring to cold, damp misery (a word that he frequently drags out like a ridiculed prisoner in medieval times) and like the swells of the orchestra, Partridge moans and wails like an actor trudging across the stage, the spotlight following him as he holds his broken umbrella against the downpour. I swear that this song needs a broadway-style, “It’s Oh So Quiet” music video—the imagery is jus too vivid for it to go without it.

And then we’re right back to having a jolly old time with “Season Cycle.” Duality of Skylarking.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Scattered Showers – Rainbow Rowell – messy love and a chance of rain.

“The Rainbow Connection” – Kermit the Frog

Yeah. Well. If you need me to pay for your insurance following this whiplash, I’ll fork it over. But this is more of a palate-cleanser, right? Guess I ought to keep you on your toes. Or maybe you just need a bit of a break from Mike Patton growling about your menstruating heart. Take a breather. Find the rainbow connection.

Honestly, this song came on here solely since I’ve been thinking about The Muppets lately, and how glad I am that I had such an absurd and clever slice of positivity in my childhood. There seriously will never be another creator quite like Jim Henson, but it’s worth it to take his felt-covered gospel to heart: to keep imagination and joy close to your heart, always, whether or not you have an equally whimsical puppet on your hand.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Any comforting book from your childhood – whatever made you feel good when you were younger should do the trick.

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!