Tag: mary in the junkyard

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (5/27/25) – Light Years from Home

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I’ve had several of Mike Chen’s novels floating around my TBR for quite some time. I’d forgotten that I’d read a short story of his in From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back, and I figured I’d give his novel-length writing a try. Plus, I was just in a sci-fi mood (as I always am). Despite the flaws that dragged down the premise, Light Years from Home was an ambitious novel that blended genres and didn’t shy away from being messy. Whether it successfully cleaned up its messes, however, is up for debate.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Light Years from Home – Mike Chen

15 years ago, the Shao family was thrown into disarray. Jakob, the only son, and their father disappeared. Their father later returned, dazed, disoriented, and convinced that he and Jakob were abducted by aliens. He died soon after.

Jakob has been missing for over a decade now. Sisters Evie and Kass haven’t spoken since the incident, with Evie diving into alien conspiracy theories and Kass throws herself into her work and caring for their aging mother. But when Jakob returns, parroting their late father’s theories about alien abduction, the sisters have no choice to bury the hatchet and reunite. As Jakob’s story grows wilder and the rift between the sisters widens, they must contend with the possibility that all of this may be true—but can Jakob be trusted? And if his story is true, what does it mean for the fate of Earth?

TW/CW: death of a parent, grief, dementia themes, substance abuse (smoking, drinking)

In the acknowledgments, Mike Chen says that this story was initially inspired by “Red” by Belly, and I’m tempted to give it another half a star just because I’ve never heard anyone outside of my immediate family or Pitchfork talk about them. The title also makes me think of The Rolling Stones’ “2000 Light Years from Home,” but that’s a vague enough title that it could be a reference to a lot of things. Although Belly didn’t save every flaw, Light Years from Home is a solid meld of science fiction and realistic fiction.

Light Years from Home has one of the most compelling beginnings of a book that I’ve read recently. You’re thrown right into the action aboard a Seven Bells spaceship in a classic space opera setting. Jakob cradles his alien comrade in his arms as they die, and thus begins his perilous quest back to Earth. But the reader and Jakob are the only people who know about this—the only other character who did (their dad) is notably dead. It would’ve been easy to just have the characters not believe him, but Jakob is already established as an unreliable person—his real life experience sounds suspiciously like an outrageous lie he would’ve told in his college days, which gives the characters both more obstacles to overcome, but more of their messy family dynamic to dissect. In terms of plot, Light Years from Home was a great study in not taking the easy way out—everything was messy and tangled, making for a book that had lots of drama and hurdles to pick apart.

Every single member of the Shao member was on the obnoxious, insufferable side (save for maybe Evie), but Chen did a great job of capturing the complicated family dynamic in the novel. Fifteen years after Jakob’s abduction, the wounds remain raw, and not a single member of the family has recovered from the fallout. Although I wasn’t satisfied at all with the character development of…well, any of the family (I’ll get to that later), Chen did an excellent job of weaving together all of the contrasting beliefs, motivations, and traumas that each family member had. All of them dealt with Jakob and their dad’s disappearance and death, respectively, in wildly different ways, and their coping mechanisms butted heads over the course of the novel. Even though this was ultimately handled poorly at the end, I did also appreciate the sensitive depiction of their mom’s dementia; Chen did a very respectful job of depicting the emotional impact of her memory loss and not being able to recognize her own children.

For all of the focus on the messy Shao family, the promised character development that their dynamic hinged on was not delivered on. There should’ve been plenty of conflict with Jakob reckoning with the man he was on Earth versus the man he was while serving in space with the Seven Bells, yet none of that happened. All of his character development happened off-page, resulting in a character that came off more flatly than I think was intended. Likewise, Kass and Evie were set up for significant development, but nothing happened with them either. Evie’s beliefs were reinforced and she and stayed static throughout the novel, not giving up her fantasies of aliens for the sake of the family. The closest Kass got, if you could call “okay, I guess aliens do exist” character development, was a brief revelation that even though she’s a therapist, that she doesn’t know everything about herself or her family, and that she shouldn’t pretend to know everything. That last half of my sentence amounted to about a paragraph around 50 pages before the novel ended, and it felt like entirely too little too soon. In the end, the character development was a jumble of unfulfilled promises—we got the shells of what could’ve been nuanced characters, but despite the bizarre journey they went on, they came out the exact same as they were before.

Also…I’m sorry, what the hell was that ending? Somehow, it was one of the most anticlimactic parts of the whole novel, and weird in ways that didn’t make sense. Jakob returns to the Seven Bells, but there’s hardly any fanfare or even extended moments of grief from the sisters, even though their brother has just decided to spend the rest of his life in space and never see them again. There wasn’t nearly enough emotion to it, and nor was there page time—this moment only gets around 4-6 pages tops. Instead of an emotional resolution with her daughters, the mom somehow un-dementias herself and remembers everything, and is also eerily content with her only son’s decision to spend the rest of his life in space. It all just felt so rushed and emotionally stunted compared to the rest of the novel, and not nearly as detailed as it needed to be. Weird is the only way to adequately describe it. I felt lost, but also robbed of what could’ve been something so bittersweet. I feel like it’s partially a side effect of none of the characters having any character development, but it felt like such a lack of a resolution. It was practically a non-ending.

All in all, a sci-fi/realistic fiction blend that embraced messiness in both plot and character, but had significant trouble with cleaning it up. 3.5 stars!

Light Years from Home is a standalone, but Mike Chen is the author of several novels. He has contributed short stories to From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and the full-length novel Brotherhood to the Star Wars universe. He is also the author of We Could Be Heroes, Vampire Weekend, Here and Now and Then, A Quantum Love Story, and many more novels for adults.

Today’s song:

NEW MARY IN THE JUNKYARD WOOOOOOOOOOO

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

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 2/9/25

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 Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 12/29/24

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: Patchwork songs, and a few too many lyrics that hit me like a train. It’s the final Sunday Songs of the year…I might as well ramble.

Enjoy the final Sunday Songs of 2024!

SUNDAY SONGS: 12/29/24

“Tuesday” – mary in the junkyard

“this is my california” was my introduction to mary in the junkyard, but “Tuesday” was what convinced me to like them. [slides glasses up bridge of nose] Having listened to their entire discography now (read: a four-song EP and three singles), I gather that, whenever it comes time for them to release an album, I’ll be happy with the product, but I really, really hope that “Tuesday” is more the direction that they go in.

“Tuesday” might as well be three songs Frankensteined together into a neat five minutes, but in its shambling, stitched-up form, it packs an unexpected punch. Imagine: three figures hunched over a cauldron. One adds something adjacent to your typical sadgirl indie, one adds the juiciest bass-line you’ve ever heard, and another adds a skittering tribute to Radiohead’s “2+2=5.” Pieces of the patchwork monster reveal themselves in the light in the form of Clari Freeman-Taylor’s lyrics—a favorite of mine is “I feel like an alien here/Breathing from a separate hole.” As…gross an image that potentially conjures (no, not that hole, GET YOUR MIND OUT OF THE GUTTER), it’s apt for the jerkily combined spare and found parts of this song. It’s an urgent sprint through a foreign landscape, furtive as it darts into alleys and backroads as it tries to find its way around. The disheveled yeti in the music video seems more whimsical than the lyrics imply, but it’s nonetheless a story of a creature out of its element.

Freeman-Taylor, when interviewed for The Line of Best Fit, explained that “Tuesday” was written about living in the city for the first time: “[I] was feeling very small…I wanted to write about my yearning for chaos and realness—we all have wildness within us that we might be suppressing and we shouldn’t feel like aliens because of it.” Wildness and chaos are what stands out to me—”Tuesday” scampers with the speed of a frantic prey animal, cornered as it finds a new burrow to dart into. Cities and nature have a very different kind of chaos to them—a city’s chaos feels bred by the bustle of machinery and productivity, and it becomes so compressed and rushed that order births chaos; nature’s chaos comes only from the cycle of itself. That clash of opposite breeds of chaos is where “Tuesday” finds its not-so-happy, alien(ated) medium, the space between the shards of flint where the embers crack away.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Beautyland – Marie-Helene Bertino – isolation, alienation, and surviving both from suburbs to big cities.

“Julie” – Horsegirl

First off: in concert with an excellent song, I have to praise this incredible music video by Daphna Awadish Golan! Her style melds so well with the collaged aesthetic of Horsegirl’s album covers and sound; the music video consists entirely of black and white footage of cities, animals, and people colored in with pastels that jump away from the grainy shades of gray.

As for “Julie” itself, the song makes me even more excited for Phonetics On & On just because I entirely can’t pinpoint the direction that Horsegirl are going in—and that excites me so much. Sure, albums have their more energetic points and their slower points, but this track is only one song away from “2468” and lands just past the halfway mark of the album. Their first album, Versions of Modern Performance, was fairly cohesive in its tempo and the invitations of different sounds and lyrical styles; aside from the instrumental interludes, there were never any slowdowns unless it was to watch a song crumble (“The Fall of Horsegirl”), but even that was crunched out and artsied-up to the extreme.

That’s not to say that “Julie” isn’t artsy, but it touches a more introspective side that the band have rarely reached thus far. The skeleton, aside from the slower tempo, is as Horsegirl as ever: guitar slides that dart around like frightened koi in a pond, buzzing synths, and a healthy dose of “da-da-da-da”s integrated throughout. (Is it really Horsegirl if there’s no da-da-da-da?) Yet the lyrics deviate from their usual style of sticking nonsense phrases together. Whether or not there’s a real Julie behind it, they extend reflection and comfort towards a figure: “Well, there’s something on your plate/You wish it was morе than you could take/We have so many mistakеs to make/What do you want from them?” It feels like an encouragement to break from monotony and form; the colored-over footage of subways in the music video emphasize that impression, but the mistakes to make feels to me like an encouragement to be human, to break free of a routine or lifestyle that isn’t necessarily crushing, but nonetheless doesn’t serve you either. With the way that the Horsegirl gang has with weird words, it doesn’t surprise me that they have something more emotional in them, but either way, it’s a promising glimpse of Phonetics On & On.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Some Girls Do – Jennifer Dugan – “To have the same dream three times a week/Favors too big for you to keep/I have so many mistakes to make/Mistakes to make with you/You know I want them too…”

“Dory Previn” – Camera Obscura

The two-week gap between it doesn’t do it justice, but I’m reaping the benefits from Suki Waterhouse’s episode of “What’s In My Bag?” She’s got taste.

What is it with Scotland and cranking out soft-sounding indie pop bands in the late 90’s and early 2000’s? Does the weather necessitate that kind of tempo? No complaints of course, knowing that they produced this and Belle and Sebastian, who Camera Obscura were heavily influenced by. Even from all the way across the pond, “Dory Previn” has a nearly country twang, but it’s distinctly indie-pop, with its ever-stargazing, wistful delivery of Tracyanne Campbell’s lyrics or the muted instrumentals. The album title, Let’s Get Out of This Country, suggest more urgency, but “Dory Previn” implies that the sentiment is more out of quiet resignation; it’s a song at the crossroads, not ready to give up a lover, but at the same time “Sick of the sight of my old lover/Went under sheets and covers to get away from him.” Simultaneously wrapped up in the waning colors of the sunset and right smack in the emotional middle of 2 a.m., it feels like the exhausted yet determined position right after you’ve cried your eyes out; you’re embarrassed it took this long to decide, but you’re making a change—for Campbell, it’s the mantra-like repetition of “I think it’s time/I put him out of my mind.”

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Man o’ War – Cory McCarthy – “So I took a glimpse of Montana/Now nothing else matters/I’ll heal eventually…”

“The Wrong Child” – R.E.M.

Can we talk about Green? Genuinely, I think the only thing wrong with the album is that the album cover isn’t green. Probably a joke between the band members and the album artist, but the burnt shade of yellow on the cover does somehow fit how the album feels—sunny, but in a humid, Southern way. Sometimes it’s the eager yellow of energy and intent (“Get Up,” “Stand”), and other times it’s the fading yellow of a sunset over memories curling up and going sepia (“I Remember California”).

I’ve loved this album since late high school, but “The Wrong Child” was one that I was so used to skipping when it came on shuffle that it became lost. To be fair, the beginning is one of the less listener-friendly ones of the album, immediately opening with the out-of-sync clash of the mandolins and the key that Michael Stipe is singing in. (Can we talk about those mandolins? If anything else, Green will make you appreciate what a mandolin can do.) Once you stay with it—and I’m so glad I did on that fateful night in early December—it contains some of Stipe’s most evocative poetry on the whole album. The first verse should be in masterclasses about the ability of music to set a scene:

“I’ve watched the children come and go/A late long march into spring/I sit and watch those children/Jump in the tall grass/Leap the sprinkler/Walk in the ground/Bicycle clothespin spokes/The sound the smell of swingset hands…”

The smell of swingset hands! It’s so specific, but I can smell exactly what Stipe is describing, the medley of the sweaty scent of skin with the tang of metal smeared all over it. There’s some gravel mixed in if I dig deep enough. I can feel the tickle of every blade of grass, each ray of sunlight. But more than that, I can feel the deep-seated aching of this song. Over the years, there have been a variety of interpretations of the song, everything from a burn victim reintegrating into society to a young gay boy’s experience of homophobia. In 2008, Stipe admitted that he’s “fine with any and all interpretations that aren’t manifested in real life as harmful, hateful or violent,” but that it was loosely centered around “a kid who is physically handicapped, and left it purposely undefined.” It is distinctly othered song. I can’t relate to the severity of what the subject experiences, but even some of it rings true for me; I did feel isolated from my peers for quite some time, in part due to my SPD, among the varied things that made me different. There was never that outright bullying, but I could see it all in the periphery, the kids that laughed behind their hands whenever I had what they saw as an overreaction to an unexpected sound—some of that “Hey those kids are looking at me/I told my friend myself/Those kids are looking at me” certainly put a bit of a knife in my gut. But this subject has become so removed from society for whatever reason that they yearn for the outside world, even if its occupants do nothing but torment them. They attempt to self-soothe, but in the end, they try to mold themself to the outside world instead of the other way around, repeating the chorus like a mantra: “I’m not supposed to be like this/But it’s okay.” And god, Stipe’s delivery of “it’s okay,” the bleeding rawness of it…oh, god. Yeah. It gets me every time. It delivers that sense that the subject is trying so hard to justify their existence and their right to play with the other kids that they’ve convinced themself that they are inherently wrong. They try and try, but never reach the happiness the other kids have, and the only way they know to try to reach it is to convince themself that they’re the problem, not the prejudice and taunting of the others. That is what any kind of prejudice does to you: it convinces you that, even if you were born in the same way as humans have been reproducing for millions of years, that you’re wrong, and not the fabricated idea of rightness taught from a young age. In the end, I’m glad that Stipe kept the subject undefined, because it does provide a kind of sanctuary, a reassurance that none of us are alone in this experience, whichever lyric rings true.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Reckless Kind – Carly Heath – “Hey those kids are looking at me/I told my friend myself/Those kids are looking at me/They’re laughing and they’re running over here/They’re laughing and they’re running over here/What do I do?”

“The Key” – Kristin Hersh

“You don’t inspire a metric ton of trust/’Cause I’m on fire, and so is all my stuff.”

There. I could just leave it at that, and it would explain the whimsical cleverness of this song, kind of like “Little Bird,” which I talked about back in July. Once again, that wouldn’t work, simply because there are just too many good lyrics here. Leave some for the rest of us, Kristin! God. So selfish. Can’t we get some of whatever creativity inspired “If I lived in a pumpkin shell/I’d have the key/And if I had a daughter/She’d look a lot like me?”

I may use the word “whimsy” quite liberally, but there’s a kind of ethereal whimsy to “The Key” that I can only describe in images. This song was a frequent visitor in my dad’s car when I was young; I associate it the most with nights spent on the car ride back from dinner or road trips. As the sky darkened, so did the images in my mind—not in emotion, just in the amount of light that was let in. Kristin Hersh felt candlelit, the kind of music meant to soundtrack a child’s nursery in the early hours of night. The lyrics nearly call to mind Lewis Carroll—save for the absence of made-up words, I wouldn’t bat an eye if you attributed “Copper and snow/Make a dusky blue boy” to one of his poems, if he’d condensed them more. Less British, of course. (Maybe that’s for the best.) We’re not getting too “Walrus and the Carpenter” with it, but we sure are close. “The Key” is inherently soft; in that children’s bedroom, dated maybe 100 years ago, with flowery, peeling wallpaper and lacy curtains, I can see a pink, plush blanket over a bed tucked in the corner, yellowed by a lantern on the dresser. Hersh’s fingerpicking has a comforting repetition to it, chords blending into each other as gently as freshly-washed hair splays out across a pillow. In between all of these images, there’s a ballerina in a music box that squeaks as it spins in a circle. Sometimes it’s the one I had as a kid, sometimes there are subtle tweaks—longer hair, different painted eyes. Like that music box, the repetition is soothing in a way that few songs are—the song’s outro of “and we’d dance all night” is a promise, and one filled with golden-lit joy to come. As Hersh’s guitar fades out, I see that mother and daughter, dancing in circles. I didn’t quite get it when I was younger, but that repetition, that security, swaddled me up like a blanket.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Lost Story – Meg Shaffer – “If I lived in a pumpkin shell/I’d have the key/And if I had a daughter/She’d look a lot like me…”

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

That’s it for the last Sunday Songs of 2024! 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!