Timefighter – The Bookish Mutant

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

Not to worry, folks: the inevitable Boygenius Breakdown™️ is scheduled for next week to allow for some time for everything to sink in. As per the never-stated-but-generally-just-implied agreement, however, this week’s Sunday Songs meets the required Queer Quotient™️ that every Bookish Mutant post is required to pass before entering the blogosphere. I’m running a tight, gay ship over here, and I’ll see to it that it stays that way.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 4/2/23

“Born on a Train” – The Magnetic Fields

In the span of about a week, “Born on a Train” sprung from just being downloaded to my third most listened-to song of this year, according to Apple Music. Maybe that says more about my penchant for wearing songs into the ground than it does about the song itself, but I swear there’s an infinite magic woven into every note of it. Snugly fit in The Charm of the Highway Strip, a loose concept album about traveling and roads, this third track gently chugs along like the train the chorus speaks of. (And another example of the band’s generally wry humor—I haven’t listen to Charm in full yet, but the fact that “Fear of Trains” is only four tracks away from this song always cracks me up. Duality of man.) The drums and muted, acoustic guitar strums throughout recall the machinery of a train, in contrast to the ringing chimes as Stephin Merritt finishes out each chorus. And as with most Magnetic Fields songs, it’s laced with bittersweetness to the core; there’s a sense of the narrator grappling with their own nature, knowing that they’re bound to leave everyone that they love, that same lonely, fleeting, twilight feel as the “ghost roads” that Merritt describes in the first verse. Merritt’s voice has the same resonance that you feel inside a cave, reverberating through your bones—it was easy to feel, hearing this song live at a smaller venue, which I still count myself incredibly lucky to have experienced.

On that habit of riding songs into the sunset, I think I get sick of only about half of them—”Born on a Train” feels like one of the ones that’ll stick.

“Drooler” – Palehound

At this point, all that’s keeping me from listening to more Palehound right now is the fact that A Place I’ll Always Go is too complicated of an album cover to draw on the door whiteboard on my dorm (wait, I forgot about posting those…maybe once school’s out? Don’t hold me to it), and for some reason, even though I can listen to any other artist’s discography out of order, I’ve stubbornly decided to do so with them. (With the albums, at least—I didn’t know this EP existed until recently…oops…) But…Dry Food was just so good. I couldn’t get enough of the whole album. Something about El Kempner’s talent for letting every instrument go loose and reining them back in just as quickly keeps me listening over and over again.

So I ended up finding and promptly listening to her very first musical outing as Palehound, 2013’s Bent Nail – EP. The decision to make “Drooler” the first track was a clearly calculated one—it lulls you in with Kempner’s brightly-toned guitar notes that seem to gently roll like a loose wagon wheel, but drops off just as quickly, breaking into a bluesy, catchy groove, strangely accented at times with the sounds of pots and pans clanging against each other. All the while, Kempner’s voice does similar gymnastics, slipping into lower tones and spiking airily high in the space of seconds. It’s hard to keep that balance—something that she frequently tests on songs like “Pet Carrot” (which works on the EP, and bafflingly maintains on her performance of it on her Tiny Desk Concert), but “Drooler” toes the line with ease. And just like that, everything that Kempner builds devolves into riotous fuzz at the end, a skidding, spark-flying crash to a perfect piece of guitar-driven indie-rock.

“Eye Patch” – De La Soul

So I’ve got another De La Soul album to add to my never ending album list, huh? I’m not complaining. Anything for another experience of wonderful, creative music, that Pos, Dove, and Mase seem to exude from their very pores, or something…

Two albums after their breakout Three Feet High and Rising, De La Soul had made a point to shed the sunshine-colored, mislabeled hippie image that had followed them everywhere, but even though that image was a major point of resentment for Plugs 1, 2, and 3 after the album’s release, listening to songs like “Eye Patch” leads me to believe that, at least musically, that spirit never quite left. Backed by the endlessly catchy samples of Jimmy Reed, the Outlaw Blues Band, and the same French language learning program that they sampled for Three Feet High and Rising, it’s another earwormy patchwork that, even from my limited experience with the band, feels like their trademark. It’s smooth, rolling like waves over your skin, the perfect walking soundtrack for a movie, or just walking to class and feeling the sun on your skin. And despite the more serious undercurrent that emerged in everything post-De La Soul is Dead, there’s still samples of sheep and children laughing—there’s no denying of the original, three fresh-out-of-high school friends making music in the basement ethos that have made De La Soul so lasting.

“Crocodile Tears and the Velvet Cosh” – David J.

Part of what I love about this song is that there will never be another song called “Crocodile Tears and the Velvet Cosh.” If there is, I can guarantee that it’ll be ripping this title off.

I can never claim to be fully goth (even though I can and will go overboard with the black eyeliner, without hesitation) partly because both Bauhaus and Love & Rockets (a.k.a Bauhaus – Peter Murphy) have historically been hit or miss for me. I’ve still found some of the latter that are already classics for me (“Holy Fool,” “Bad for You,”…why do I keep putting off listening to Lift?); the solo careers have been similarly hit or miss, though I’ve been hoarding a small handful of songs from Murphy, Ash, and David J., respectively as of late. Strangely, even though I’ve only heard two songs of his (the other being “I’ll Be Your Chauffeur”) David J. has been the one that I’ve liked the most consistently. As much as I love and respect the eclectic spirt of Love & Rockets (okay, scratch that: I can’t forgive them for “The Purest Blue,” there’s NO excuse for that nightmare fuel), sometimes you have to sit back and linger on the gentle side of things. That’s exactly what “Crocodile Tears and the Velvet Cosh” feels like for me: it slings a reassuring arm over your shoulder, and lets you relax while the breeze tugs at your hair. Filled with tiny packets of clever wordplay (“I read you like a book/Seeing through/without ever losing my place”), it’s an unassuming, acoustic piece with hidden bits that glisten in the dark.

“VBS” – Lucy Dacus

I finally got around to listening to Home Video last week, and although I wasn’t as wowed as I was with her sophomore album, Historian, it still exists as an insect trapped in amber. The album chronicles Dacus’ childhood and adolescence in Virginia, grappling with her latent queerness in contrast to her Christian upbringing, as evidenced in “VBS,” a slice-of-life recounting of church camp. Musically, Home Video wasn’t as expansive and vast as its predecessor, but Dacus’ lyricism throughout the entire album is as strong as ever—I can’t stop thinking about the lines “Sedentary secrets like peach pits in your gut/locked away like jam jars in the cellar of your heart.” For such an unassuming-sounding song (in the beginning), there are so many tiny layers to peel back, from the underlying seeds of questioning everything she’s known to the explosive burst of guitars as Dacus describes, “There’s nothing you can do, but the only thing you’ve found/playing Slayer at full volume helps to drown it out.” The latter makes me wish for more of the guitar work that Dacus displayed on songs like “Timefighter,” but that moment as a self-contained piece, like the glass butterfly boxes that form each song, makes the storytelling even clearer and cleverer than ever.

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!

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I’ll admit to being not much of a mystery reader; I’m terrible at predicting who perpetrated (x) crime, so I just end up going along for the ride like a dog sticking its head out of a car window. But I thoroughly enjoyed Evelyn Hardcastle, from its consistent suspense to its creative takes on the genre.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle – Stuart Turton

Aiden Bishop has no memory of who he is, or who he was before. All he knows is this: he is currently attending a masquerade ball at Blackheath Manor, and that at the end of the night, a famous socialite by the name of Evelyn Hardcastle will die. Every day, time starts over, and Bishop wakes up in the body of a different party guest. The only way for him to break out of Blackheath Manor is to answer this question: who killed Evelyn Hardcastle?

𝔧𝔲𝔰𝔱 𝔶𝔬𝔲 — chewbacca: KNIVES OUT dir. Rian Johnson — god, I need to watch this movie again

TW/CW: murder, suicide, gunshot wounds, near-death situations, forced marriage, poisoning, drinking

Listen. I don’t often read mysteries, but even with a limited body of work to base my thoughts off of, I can say with certainty that this is one of the most creative mysteries that I’ve ever read.

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle has drawn comparisons to the likes of everything from Agatha Christie to Groundhog Day, and I can see the threads of both in this novel! It certainly had the feel of a classic mystery, and the cyclical, time-twisting element reminded me a lot of Groundhog Day with very different stakes. In fact, Turton’s playing with time is what made Evelyn Hardcastle such an enjoyable book; with each day that Aiden experiences, the stakes are raised even higher, building a very unique brand of suspense. I’m not usually one for back-and-forth time jumps, but Evelyn Hardcastle had a precise and clear reason for doing so, and the chapter layout worked just as well to increase the tension.

Going into Evelyn Hardcastle, the concept of switching between the bodies of guests was what intrigued me most. This aspect was easily the most well-executed element of them all, bringing in a twisty and creative factor to a mystery that would otherwise seem like any other period piece murder. The fact that all of the guests were, on some level, deplorable people made this facet of the book all the better; each one of them had any number of nasty skeletons in their closets, which made the question of Evelyn’s murder all the more intriguing—it could have been anyone.

I didn’t expect for the mystery to be an orchestrated test as well; the added element of multiple body-switching guests and the enigmatic Plague Doctor character created a new layer of suspense, which not only made the stakes higher, but also stranger. The idea that the key to Aiden’s freedom was solving Evelyn Hardcastle’s murder was all the more interesting given that this twisted “game” of sorts was orchestrated by any number of cryptic agents was such an inventive way of creating tension, so hats off to Turton for finding all sorts of ways to craft a suspenseful mystery!

Plus, the amount of red herrings that got thrown around…I’m notoriously bad at a) figuring out mysteries, and b) falling for false bait, so I tend to give up on trying to solve the mystery itself and just go along for the ride. That being so, I loved all the ways that Turton threw us off the trail as readers; in multiple instances, there were times that Evelyn Hardcastle’s murder seemed deceptively simple, but there were ruses on top of ruses (or: a donut hole in a donut’s hole) that slowly unfolded to uncover the real cause of her death. I’m sure that it’s just the kind of thing that mystery readers eat up—and I certainly ate it up, even as someone who rarely reads in the genre.

Also, without spoiling anything—the fact that Evelyn Hardcastle could technically count as sci-fi (according to the interview with Stuart Turton) makes it so much more fascination, not just because I love sci-fi so much, but because of the implications that has for the origin of Blackheath Manor in the first place. FASCINATING stuff.

All in all, a crafty mystery that employed all manner of creative twists to hook the reader in. 4 stars!

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is a standalone, and it was Stuart Turton’s debut novel. Turton is also the author of The Devil and the Dark Water, and contributed to the anthology You Are Not Alone.

Today’s song: