Tag: Wilco

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 12/28/25

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: the last Sunday Songs of 2025 (good riddance), featuring one more song from Bad Sisters, early college memories, and Liz Fraser getting her money’s worth out of the letter ‘S.’

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 12/28/25

“Hate It Here” – Wilco

You know me—I’m a sucker for songs that are sweet, sincere, a little too sappy on occasion. I love a good ballad here and there. But there is a hair-thin line between being sincere and wholesome and being overly earnest and corny in a way that sounds disingenuous the minute you step an inch beyond that line. Being genuine doesn’t mean squinting more than usual when you sing into the mic and switching your guitar from electric to acoustic—unless the feeling’s there, it’s not going to sound sincere. So it’s always an acrobatic feat to make a song that’s earnest and sincere but doesn’t sound fake. Sometimes you have to be a bit of a cornball to get it across, but sometimes, being a cornball is better than thinking that you’re automatically moving people to tears by singing slightly louder.

I wouldn’t say that of Jeff Tweedy though, even if Sky Blue Sky’s legacy is that it’s the origin of the term “dad rock,” a kind of Frankenstein’s monster from Pitchfork writer Rob Mitchum, who now regrets what he created. Tweedy’s just a uniquely sincere kind of poet, no matter the lens he uses. “Hate It Here” is a long time coming on Sunday Songs ever since I discovered it this summer, after it became a setlist staple for Wilco on their most recent tour. The best way to describe it is that it’s wholesome without saccharine—Jeff Tweedy just misses his wife when she’s not there!! He’s lonely!! He loves his wife!! It’s this in song form:

It veers towards the sappy, but it’s delivered with the kind of longing you only get from a happy, stable marriage and a genuine affection—it can’t come across as anything other than wholesome. And like the house that Tweedy’s idly pacing around, there are all manner of quirky musical furnishings—this isn’t in the studio version, but on tour, when Tweedy sings “I’ll check the phone,” Mikael Jorgensen does this little riff on the keyboard that sounds like a phone ringing. And let me tell you, it instantly made me go “OH MY GOD!! HE DID THE THING!! THE PHONE!! THE PHONE IS RINGING!!” It just goes to show the ounces of care that Wilco puts into every song, no matter if it’s about the depths of addiction, existential crises…or missing the wife. Because every song deserves the same love.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet – Becky Chambers – …Ashby and Pei. Just saying.

“Cold Was the Ground” – The Limiñanas

I promise this’ll be the last of the music I’ve swiped from Bad Sisters for the foreseeable future. I can’t help it! Whoever was in charge of the music direction should’ve gotten a raise, both for the sheer volume of great songs included, but for the subtle focus on women, be it Melanie or Wet Leg, Nancy Sinatra or Bikini Kill.

If not for the fact that “Cold Was the Ground” plays in-scene while the Garvey sisters are listening to the radio, I fully would’ve thought that it was part of PJ Harvey’s score—those resonant, plucked strings at the beginning sound almost identical to the musical motifs she scattered throughout the series. It’s a song so perfect for the show’s atmosphere that the characters practically break the fourth wall and recognize it themselves—it plays on the radio while they’re disposing of a body, and they insist that Eva switch to another radio station and play something less blatantly topical. “Cold Was the Ground” is a sparse but cinematic song. If Fargo goes on for another season, this would fit perfectly in it; it has that same feel of an unsettling, Depression-era Americana standard, despite the Limiñanas being French. With Marie Limiñana’s breathy vocals, a husky whisper through the mist, you feel a kind of old-fashioned dread, evocative of a campfire story that you’re trying to pretend didn’t scare you, but becomes realer the more you look out into the dark night.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Funeral Songs for Dying Girls – Cherie Dimaline – “I was dreaming a note/In the cemetery/Shadows in my heart/And sadly/I still hear you cry…”

“Pre War Tension” (feat. Marta) – Lonely Guest

I just want to talk about the visual for the song here, because…why are we just zooming in on random parts of Joe Talbot’s face? Why is 1/3rd of this video just the camera slowly getting closer and closer to his hairline, and then zipping back down to his chin? I mean, zooming in on Marta’s eyes and smile during the “Saw it in your eyes/Sense it in your smile” line is a nice touch, but…everything else? Why does Joe Talbot’s picture look like a mugshot?? Why is Tricky’s picture so grainy compared to everybody else’s? No wonder those photos are so tiny on the Lonely Guest album cover…

Anyways. Lonely Guest is essentially just Tricky, but back in 2021, it was a collaborative side project under another name. I’ve only listened to a handful of songs from it, but it captures the modern incarnation of what Tricky’s music has bottled for me: agitation. He thrives on mining dread, anxiety, and all manner of creeping, looming feelings—Maxinquaye is a masterclass in taking that feeling and ballooning it up 10 times its normal size. Though “Pre War Tension” doesn’t musically give that feel—it’s more of a simple instrumental as far as Tricky goes—its guests do. Joe Talbot was the perfect mouthpiece for these lyrics, making the first verse sound like a less aggressive IDLES track; the opening lyrics (“There’s a Macy’s parade-sized pink elephant/In the room that renders me unintelligent”) sound straight off of Ultra Mono. But ultimately, it is still Tricky, and his signature rasp, spoken in an atonal whisper, articulates that tension of wanting to hunker down somewhere cold as the world around you slowly spirals towards ruination. Even Marta’s voice, the most even-keeled balance between Talbot and Tricky, has a kind of resignation to it despite its softness.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Junker Seven – Olive J. Kelley – “Life devours/Then it sours/You wanna go/But you really can’t stay/Your trouble and strife…”

“Aloysius” – Cocteau Twins

I doubt this is an applicable situation for anybody, but if you ever need to explain the definition of “sibilant” to someone (1. making or characterized by a hissing sound or 2. [of a speech sound] sounded with a hissing effect, for example s, sh), just use this song. This song was brought to you by the letter ‘S’: silly, saliva, sashimi, should’ve. Of course, I write down about half of those words without complete certainty that they’re in the lyrics, but either way, it’s a very sibilant song, silky and ethereal like the fabric draped over Treasure’s album cover. Due to that emphasis on ‘S,’ “Aloysius” is one of the more indecipherable Cocteau Twins songs for me—as used to their relative gibberish as I am, all of them blend together like watercolors with that consonant repetition. Frazer makes ‘S’ not even sound like a consonant anymore, with the airy treatment it gets, along with all of the vowels strung along with it. That’s the real talent of Frazer for me: words are malleable things in her hands, elevated beyond words and into strings of pearls.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Courtney Crumrin, vol. 1: The Night Things – Ted Naifeh – iykyk.

“Simulation Swarm” – Big Thief

I’ve manage to only double-dip on Sunday Songs sparingly through the years, but I’ve fallen for it again. To be fair, this one appeared before I was even writing about these and maybe 20 people saw them on my Instagram story, so we can pretend that this isn’t a repeat.

“Simulation Swarm” is so distinctly 2022 for me, and yes, I know, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You came out that year, but it’s a very specific part of 2022 for me. I remember listening to it while facing the lawn surrounding my freshman dorm in college, the sunlight on the fresh grass, the fear shaky in my legs as my headphones snaked over the worn strap on my purse. I was impressionable to my brother’s music taste then, and I still am now, but he and his girlfriend were guiding me through my first wobbly steps into college (god, THANK YOU GUYS), leaving Big Thief songs like crumbs along the way. I probably heard it at one of the coffee shops on campus too, but either way, if the local coffee shop run by college students isn’t playing Big Thief, what’s the point?

Cobbled together from a series of Lenker’s experiences—hospitalization, a childhood spent in a cult, and her separation from her brother—”Simulation Swarm” is so bursting with yearning that’s it’s difficult to pin down exactly how I feel about it on any given day. I’ve leaned towards an eagerness to escape myself, but it’s a tender little mood ring that burns a bit when you leave it on your finger for too long. Lenker’s lyrics are so poetic and surreal in nature that I can’t help but imagine a fantastical undercurrent to it; my heart always snags on the “last human teachers” bit, maybe just from the sci-fi image that it conjures up. Sure, the verse about “building an energy shield” in the backyard feels very much like kids playing pretend, but I can’t help but thinking of children on a faraway planet, scraping enough money together to make their energy shield out of scrap metal and hijack a spaceship and fly it far, far away, as far as they can get. That emotion, positive or negative, feels to me like the yearning for freedom—like the empty horses, it yearns to break free, and in the chorus, you get the feeling that something’s finally snapped, broken loose, and broken its chains: “I’d fly to you tomorrow/I’m not fighting in this war/I wanna drop my arms and take your arms/And walk you to the shore.”

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Hero for WondLa (The Search for WondLa, #2) – Tony DiTerlizzi – “I remember building an energy shield/In your room, like a temple/Swallows in the windless field/Very thin, with your mother/Tall as a pale green tree…”

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: 12/14/25

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

Since I had to hunker down for one more week for finals, here’s my graphic from that week:

12/7/25:

This week: Even more songs from Bad Sisters, circling back to Forever is a Feeling, and getting unexpectedly chucked back to November 2019.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 12/14/25

“Mother Whale Eyeless” – Brian Eno

Sorry, folks. It’s too early for me to draft my New Year’s Resolutions, but they probably won’t include “shut the fuck up about Brian Eno.” You’re in for a long few years.

Back in November, at the behest of my older brother, I finally got around to listening to Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). Pardon the hyperbole, but to call it just an album feels like a disservice, mostly because there’s just so much crammed in there. It’s a whole stuffed Thanksgiving turkey of esoteric references and inspirations; the main defining threads are loosely centered around the Chinese Communist Revolution and general themes of warfare, but even that somehow doesn’t scratch the surface. Plane crashes, a Belgian town whose population is outnumbered by the patients in its local mental asylum, and a play dating back to the Chinese Communist Revolution (from which the album took its name) are just some of the scattered subjects that Eno covers in its 48-minute runtime. He verges from a campy satire of the military on “Back in Judy’s Jungle” to punk-precursor “Third Uncle” to the deeply moving “Taking Tiger Mountain,” a song that closes the album with the same huddled, melancholic yet triumphant feelingI always get listening to The Beach Boys’ cover of “Old Man River.” (Blame it on Fantastic Mr. Fox.) And yet, with all of those disparate images clanking about, it’s so cohesive. The thread, I think, is both Eno coming into his own as a solo artist, as well as his riotously creative imagination—it’s an album with such a distinctive style that could never be authentically replicated, no matter how hard somebody might try. There can never be another Eno, and there can never be another Tiger Mountain. It’s just so singular in its uniqueness.

Something that bubbled up in me while listening to Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy was that although many of the lyrics are abjectly nonsensical, I found myself getting emotional out of nowhere. For “Taking Tiger Mountain,” I could pinpoint a more easily categorized reason—it’s got the feeling of relief, of victory at a steep cost, of the tearful end of a film. The other that got me misty on the first listen was “Mother Whale Eyeless.” Eschewed by the delightfully stream-of-consciousness lyrics, there’s something about a fundamental change—many have interpreted it as a relationship that can’t go on and the mounting fear of the inevitable implosion. Either way, something’s on the horizon, and it’s a shadow of dread—as in a “cloud containing the sea,” or the formidable shadow a whale might cast upon a school of passing fish. Yet what gets me about this song is that there’s some sort of near-euphoric feeling of ascent to it—you get the feeling like it’s piercing the very atmosphere like a rocket breaking the sound barrier; the only way it can go is higher, higher, higher still. There’s something anticipatory about it, yet there’s no explosive finale—you just break the sound barrier and are left with the fallout. The fallout is the euphoric journey that Eno takes you on, through winding turns buoyed by his Oblique Strategies (you’ll really get the meaning about his emphasis on repetition and/or lack thereof after listening to this song). Phil Manzanera’s guitar soars, aching of Low-era Bowie before it even existed, and Phil Collins’ pattering drums add jet fuel to the anticipatory nature of the track. (Also, I swear the electronic background noises in the very beginning sound a lot like the intro to St. Vincent’s “Big Time Nothing.” Just me?)

But the centerpiece for me is the refrain sung by Polly Eltes. This is where I got choked up out of nowhere. The entrance of Manzanera’s fuller guitar work allows for a breather and opens up the curtain for Eltes’ voice, in which she sings: “In my town, there is a raincoat under a tree/In the sky, there is a cloud containing the sea/In the sea, there is a whale without any eyes/In the whale, there is a man without his raincoat.” (I swear her voice reminds me a little of Régine Chassagne.**) There’s an uncanny feeling of poignant simplicity of it; it feels like a nursery rhyme, or a proudly recited line of an epic poem. To me, it almost feels like a declaration of purpose: an open defiance of interpretation, a thesis that even the most dreamlike and esoteric lyricism can be just as emotional as something that tackles a subject head-on. Either way, there is no denying the feeling that “Mother Whale Eyeless” gives me.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Mad Sisters of Esi – Tashan Mehta – I promise I’m not putting this in here solely because of the whale…but I’m not saying they’re not connected. Either way, that surreal, imaginative quality of Eno pairs well with Mehta’s writing.

“Bullseye” (feat. Hozier) – Lucy Dacus

When Forever is a Feeling first came out, I felt like her having a Hozier feature added to the feeling that Lucy Dacus had begun to sell out. I suppose the overlap between their fanbases (read: gay people) was essentially a circle, so it probably was inevitable anyway. No disrespect to Hozier though—very talented guy, and I love his voice, but his music isn’t always my cup of tea.

To my surprise, “Bullseye” has become one of my most played songs from the album. There’s something so tender about it that reminds me of Dacus’ older work. I think what sets Dacus’ songwriting is that every emotion comes through in the most unexpected vignettes—the opening lines of “Next of Kin” (“Reading in the phone booth/Sucking on a ginger root”) come to mind. She has such a keen, observational eye that decorates her songs with the most unique setpieces, like some kind of musical bowerbird building a nest. While the ones in “Bullseye” stand out as more obviously romantic (carving locks into initials on bridges, reading annotations in your lover’s books), it’s so clear how much it shapes her songwriting. She admits it herself: “Found some of your stuff at my new house/Packed it on accident when I was movin’ out/Probably wrong to think of them as your gifts to me/More like victims of my sentimentality.” She’s a kind of museum curator of fleeting, stolen moments, which make up the core of “Bullseye.” And although Hozier isn’t normally my cup of tea, his voice with Dacus’ makes up such rich, heartstring-tugging harmonies that give the song an added layer of tender warmth.

Though I wasn’t able to catch her on this tour, the highlight has been seeing her perform this song, not just because of how lovely it is. She’s been making it her mission to duet with as many people as possible—David Bazan, Samia, Stuart Murdoch, and Jay Som, among others!

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Lakelore – Anna-Marie McLemore – “You’re a bullseye, and I aimed right/I’m a straight shot, you’re a grand prize/It was young love, it was dumb luck/Holdin’ each other so tight, we got stuck…”

“People in the Front Row” – Melanie

For the next two songs, we enter what I’m calling the Bad Sisters section. If I had a nickel for every Melanie song I’ve ripped from a season finale of Bad Sisters, I’d have two nickels, etc., etc.

Like many of Melanie’s more iconic songs, “People in the Front Row” is an anthem for sticking to your guns, even in the face of critics. It’s much more literal than others, and although her voice falters in wobbly ways, given the belts she’s capable of, it’s full of the same impassioned fervor of hits like “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma.” The odd laugh-singing aside, it’s such a poignant, determined ode to the people who support your art through thick and thin, no matter how much critics kick you down.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

You Should See Me in a Crown – Leah Johnson – “You know I looked around for faces I’d know/I fell in love with the people in the front row/Oh, how my predicament grew/Now I got friends, and I think that my friends are you…”

“Billie Holiday” – Warpaint

Warpaint have historically been hit-or-miss for me; I’ve loved their cover of David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” since middle school, but most of their music has been rather lukewarm for me. I have a specific memory of trying to listen to their self-titled album on a whim several years ago and being, disappointedly, quite bored. But every once in a while, they’ll snag me out of nowhere (see also, from this EP: “Burgundy”).

This one came out of the blue in a scene in season 2 of Bad Sisters, ironically placed, given the context; it matches the eerie, melancholic tone of the scene, in which Becka finds out that she’s unexpectedly pregnant and, instead of telling her boyfriend, does what any sensible person does and…cheats on him with the guy that she’s insisted she’s over with. Naturally. (What the hell, Becka?? She’s a hot mess, if you couldn’t already tell.) There’s a deep irony behind using this song, which repeats various platitudes about staying loyal: “Nothing you can buy could make me tell a lie to my guy/Nothing you could do could make me untrue to my guy/I gave my guy my word of honor to be faithful and I’m gonna/You best be believing, I won’t be deceiving my guy.” [Ron Howard voice] Becka did, in fact, deceive her guy.

Maybe there’s a layer of irony to that beyond Bad Sisters, as although the melody is entirely original, around half of the lyrics, including the ones above, are interpolated from Mary Wells’ “My Guy.” When that much of the song is interpolated, it almost feels like cheating, even if the proper credit was given to Wells (as well as Smokey Robinson, who wrote the song). Yet it’s an entirely different atmosphere that they’re placed in, like a zoo animal let loose in a completely foreign biome; as opposed to Wells’ cheery, Motown organs, “Billie Holiday” is draped in reverb, misty strings, and acoustic guitars. It’s like wandering through a thick fog, where Wells’ song is as bright and clear as day. I suppose it’s a similar deal to Spiritualized’s use of “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” but that, to me, felt much more transformative, and used only one verse (as opposed to the three verses of Wells’ that Warpaint used). Easy way out it may be, but at least the end product is appropriately distinct, and compellingly dreamy.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Funeral Songs for Dying Girls – Cherie Dimaline – “As I walk this line, I am bound by the other side/And it’s for my heart that I’ll live/’Cause you’ll never die…”

“One Wing” – Wilco

Do you ever have those moments where a song hits you out of the park with some deeply vivid place in time that you didn’t see coming? Leave it to Wilco to throw another unexpectedly emotional curveball right into my face out of nowhere. Instantly, I had this feeling of being cold, of being in a gray parking lot. My mind placed it in November of 2019, by some uncanny instinct. I can’t place why, but I only just remembered that I had a borderline religious experience at the front row of a Wilco concert…in November of 2019. Maybe that parking lot was in the chill of the Mission Ballroom at night. My brain, inexplicably, just knew to place it at this time, even if “One Wing” isn’t in the setlist.

The brain truly fascinates me sometimes. There’s a part of me that wants to know everything about why it remembers what it does, and why it innately attaches feelings and memories to music out of nowhere. But somehow, I feel like that would ruin the magic of these fleeting, unexpected moments. I love the way my brain plays with memory and image the way it does, the way even the faintest whiff of an old tube of lipgloss or the notes of Nels Cline’s guitar is instantly transportive. I think it would ruin everything if I knew the precise logic of why my brain shuffles the cards and comes up with these vivid, dreamlike images. Sometimes, I think we ought to bask in that mystery. Tip our hats to the strange phenomena, etc. What a lovely, strange organ we have.

Oh, wait, I’m talking about a song, right? Oops. And what a song it is—I don’t know how this one completely passed me by, but Wilco always has the most moving surprises up its sleeve. From what I’ve heard of Wilco: The Album (featuring “Wilco (The Song),” there’s a lot of conflicting themes—said band theme song, more songs about murder, and determined love songs; but for an album like that, it makes sense for the songs to run the gamut of the range of the band. Next to “I’ll Fight,” “One Wing” makes clear sense—I’m not sure if it’s directly about Tweedy’s relationships, but there’s a clear undercurrent of wanting to rekindle faltering love and repairing something broken. (I’ve also seen interpretations that the “wings” allude to the divisions in American politics—literally the left and right wings—and while the broken relationship makes more sense to me personally, it makes me see things in a new light. A precursor to “Cruel Country” and “Ten Dead,” maybe?) That late-fall chill feels deliberate in the face of the haunted longing in “One Wing”—as the chorus picks up steam, it feels like icy wind buffeting against your cheeks, plucking tears from your eyes as you cling to someone for comfort. Nels Cline’s guitar, with a soaring tone reminiscent of A Ghost is Born, is as plaintive as Jeff Tweedy’s lyricism, all channeled into a plea for forgiveness against the friction of the world: “One wing will never ever fly, dear/Neither yours nor mine/I fear we can only wave goodbye.” It digs at such a tender, weak part in my soul…ouch, Jeffie.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Seep – Chana Porter – “We once belonged to a bird/Who cast his shadow on this world/You were a blessing and I was a curse/I did my best not to make things worse for you…”

*”oh, haha, a goofy kid’s song!” without a shred of irony, this is an absolute banger. Somehow, it ended up being my most-listened to song for November, according to Apple Music. Never underestimate the power of They Might Be Giants writing about numbers.

**In other music news I haven’t gotten around to talking about…I try not to be in the active practice of hoping for people to get divorces, but I am so, so glad Régine Chassagne got out of there.

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

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

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (11/25/25) – Mad Sisters of Esi

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Guess who’s back…for only a week, probably. We’ll see. My college is on this maddening schedule that only gives us one (1) week after Thanksgiving Break and then it’s straight into finals, so I’ve been grinding for most of November. But now I’m on break, thank goodness!

I found out about Mad Sisters of Esi while doing a research paper on the history of science fiction in India. It sounded intriguing—who doesn’t love an incomprehensibly large cosmic whale, after all? I’m not usually one for fantasy (citation needed) novels that are this dense and self-referential, but there was so much passion poured into every word that I couldn’t help but be dragged along for the bizarre ride.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Mad Sisters of Esi – Tashan Mehta

Myung and Laleh are inseparable sisters living inside the Whale of Babel, a whale the size of a galaxy, large enough to contain planets in the folds of its body. They have never known life outside of the Whale, save for the Great Wisa, their distant, unknown creator. Laleh is content to explore the endless lands inside the Whale’s body, but Myung yearns for something more. Her journey takes her to the far edges of the universe, but so far that she cannot find her way back to her only home. As Myung and Laleh attempt to find their way back to each other, they ponder the stories that got them to where they were, and if stories themselves can bring them back together.

TW/CW: loss of loved ones, grief, abandonment

If you’re wondering how I’ve been lately, I’m apparently saturating myself with “[]ad Sisters” media. Mad Sisters of Esi? Bad Sisters? What am I doing here? What’s going on with all these sisters?

I’m glad that this trend doesn’t have a name, but I love the trend of recent genre fiction coming to conclusion that “maybe [x] was the friends we made along the way” can actually be a very powerful message. Maybe storytelling was the friends we made along the way. God. What a book.

I was captivated by the premise of Mad Sisters of Esi, but I could have easily not been. It falls into those fantasy books that verge more on the literary side that are very self-serious about been multilayered, dense, and Deep with a capital D. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but toeing the line between a story that’s actually meaningful and a book that’s 500+ pages of needlessly convoluted, pretentious nonsense that only serves as a monument for how supposedly complex of a plot the author could dish up. The latter are often all style and no substance, but the real frustrating part is that they’re so convinced of their substance that it deadens any meaning that it could’ve had. (See my review of The Spear Cuts Through Water. At least Simon Jimenez has other good books. Go read The Vanished Birds instead of that one.) It’s just a literary version of “look, Ma, no hands!” that rarely results in anything really substantive.

My main criticism of Mad Sisters of Esi is that it does stray into that territory sometimes. It never fully went over the edge for me, but there were moments were it got too convoluted for both my taste and the service of the narrative. Most of it was complex, but not needlessly so, but at a certain point, parts of it got dizzying. I definitely didn’t get everything about this book, and I feel like it’s almost the point. For me, what separates the two kinds of fantasy novel that I just described is…well, love. I could tell right away that Mehta didn’t write Mad Sisters of Esi to show off how complicated of a narrative that she could write—there’s a story, a tangible message, and a thrum of passion that spills through in every page. With every fictional academic article and magical town, I knew that Mehta’s world was born of love. Which, given the nature of this book’s themes, is exactly what it should have been. It’s a novel that’s all about love, storytelling, and the act of creation, and Mehta’s writing felt more than faithful to that premise.

Mad Sisters of Esi is full of meta commentary on the nature of storytelling. I’ll get more into that aspect later, but part of what sold those thematic elements was Mehta’s prose itself. Mehta is clearly someone who has studied her fair share of fairytales. Mad Sisters of Esi doesn’t just feel like a fairy tale in terms of the plot—Mehta’s prose has the same enchanting quality of a timeless fairy tale. The narrator bobs in and out, always with a cryptic lesson. The lush world is rendered in the most magical, wondrous detail. All of the descriptions surrounding Myung and Laleh make them sound like classic protagonists in an ancient tale. It was all very self-aware, but in a way that made the story feel fuller—and drew me in page by page. With Mehta’s strong hand, every location that Myung visited was bursting with bizarre, fantastical life—I was hooked on nearly every aspect.

If this novel has made me realize anything, it’s that we don’t have nearly enough cosmic whales in literature. We need more of them, frankly. Or maybe not—I’m torn on whether or not we should gatekeep them so they don’t get tired. I doubt they would, though. Either way, you can’t just promise a galaxy-sized whale full of planets and two sisters that live inside it and not deliver on that premise. Thankfully, Mehta did in spades. The world of Mad Sisters of Esi was a sight to behold. Every minute detail was somehow nonsensical and yet made perfect sense. It all felt very trippy and whimsical, and above all, so vibrant. I loved every quirk in every location that Myung visited in the vast universe; I’ve seen reviews compare it to The Phantom Tollbooth, and honestly, I have to agree—it has that same absurd, dreamlike quality more often than not. Beyond that, I love the integration of the academic articles and research papers about all of the bizarre events and people within this novel—it added such a fun layer of worldbuilding that made it all feel more grounded and real—as much as it could be, with all of the out-of-this-world (no pun intended) stuff that was going on.

With all of the emphasis on madness, I was really hoping there wasn’t going to be yet another story about art being all about suffering. From how incredible the first few chapters were, I was hopeful. But with everything about madness, madness, madness…doubt crept into my mind, for sure. I’m not confident that I fully got what Mehta intended, but I feel like this is what I took away from it. There is a little madness in every creation, even if you’re not actively suffering—how do you create a massive cosmic whale and not go a little crazy? Yet she emphasizes that even if you pour your all into your creation, that you run the risk of losing yourself, and that’s when your creation goes wrong. Mehta’s madness isn’t the suffering kind of madness—it’s about the passion. It’s about throwing all of your love into the act of creating, just so that the world is a little brighter and less boring than it was before, and to give your love a physical form. The reason that Myung is so lost out in the universe is that she strays from something that was created with nothing but love. That’s my two cents (is that expression even relevant anymore now that we don’t have pennies?), especially given how the novel concluded. That’s why the passion I felt from every page felt authentic—the passion is what it’s about, to love what you create and not destroy yourself in the process, because you too are made of love.

All in all, a dazzling and surreal space fantasy full of love, sisterhood, and whales. 4.5 stars!

Mad Sisters of Esi is a standalone, but Tashan Mehta is also the author of the novella The Liar’s Weave, and has contributed to several anthologies, including Magical Women, Solarpunk Creatures, and The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction, Vol. 2.

Today’s song:

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

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 9/28/25

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 Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 8/3/25

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: even if Wilco wasn’t ever-present in The Bear, we’d have to physically restrain Jeff Tweedy just to stop him constantly cooking in that kitchen. Plus: lots of top tier album intros and some lyrics I probably should’ve reconsidered playing in the presence of my guitar teacher.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 8/3/25

“Lovely Head” – Goldfrapp

Both Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory had been musically active before they joined forces, but even then, to come right out the gate with a single like this is so impressive for a band just getting its start. “Lovely Head” was the first single that Goldfrapp ever released and eventually became the opening track for their debut album, Felt Mountain. The U.S. didn’t seem to see the wave of popularity it eventually gained, but in the U.K., it was used liberally in film, TV, and commercials in the early 2000’s. But if there was ever a song that was meant for all of those things, it’s this one. Everything about it is cinematic, from the Ennio Morricone-like whistling intro to the soaring, theremin-like melodies, which wasn’t actually a theremin at all—just Alison Goldfrapp’s voice filtered through a synthesizer. It’s just so deliciously eerie, cool and distant, with lyrics that seem romantic only from the furthest distance, but disaffected and almost scientific once you examine them more closely. “Frankenstein would want your mind/Your lovely head” is probably only romantic for…y’know, a serial killer, or something, but it’s the precise effect that I think the song is going for—a love song penned by a cold-blooded killer.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Catherine House – Elisabeth Thomas – an eerie atmosphere, eerie interactions with eerie people, all in an eerie, secretive college.

“Devereaux” – Car Seat Headrest

I promise I’ll shut up about Car Seat Headrest for a few more months after this week. Well…I can’t make any promises.

Though I never got around to writing an album review for The Scholars (or any other of the amazing albums that have come out this year…oops. Phonetics On & On is the only album to come out in 2025, folks! Rejoice!), I feel like it’d be a crime for me to not talk about “Devereaux” at some point. After the back-to-back slew of excellent singles, “Devereaux,” along with “Equals,” is the song I’ve come back to the most from The Scholars. It’s what duped me into thinking that the album was going to be a re-hash of Teens of Denial, but even though it calls back to the song, the rest of the album proved me dead wrong…though I wouldn’t complain about Teens of Denial 2: Electric Boogaloo. Despite being from the perspective of one of Will Toledo’s many characters, a crocodile named Devereaux, the themes of living under the roof of religious bigotry and longing for escape could’ve been plucked straight out of his early discography. Anthemic and pleading, I see it becoming a future crowd-pleaser at shows—the kind I’d see the fans emphatically jumping up and down to. Hell, I saw them doing that on this tour, and it was only the second song in the setlist. Toledo’s soaring vocals meld the yearning, melancholic lyrics into a cry of longing: “I wasn’t born to be this, I was born to fight dragons/With a cowl on my face/With an auspicious birthday.” If there was ever a more air-punch worthy song, chock-full of lyrics meant to be yelled into the spacious walls of a sturdy venue, or simply into the darkness of a firefly-tinged summer night, “Devereaux” is it.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Agnes at the End of the World – Kelly McWilliams – “In the land beyond me and you/A bunch of kids who don’t know what to do/We all wait in the silence to hear…”

“One Tiny Flower” – Jeff Tweedy

BREAKING: water is wet, the sky is blue (sky blue sky, even? [gets dragged offstage by a comically large cane]), and Jeff Tweedy cannot stop cooking. Seriously! Even within a band, how is it possible that in the last five years, this man has put out one solo album, two albums (one of which is a double album) and an EP with Wilco, three reissues of past albums, and now a triple album out this September? It’s been a while since I’ve read Tweedy’s book, How to Write One Song, but if that kind of insane output—not only prolific, but consistently good to boot—doesn’t convince you that he can, in fact, teach you how to write one song, then I don’t know what will.

I had a feeling why he continues to be so prolific. In my experience, creativity blossoms most when you’ve got something impelling it: not necessarily spite, anger, or negative emotion, but any kind of passion that pushes you to put something new out into the world. Give yourself into it too much, you lose the outside world, and you lose the reality that must be grounded to; lose sight of it, and you forget that everything pushing against you in the world, positive and negative, can be a source to revive that creativity. Tweedy put it this way in a statement about the album: “When you choose to do creative things, you align yourself with something that other people call God…and when you align yourself with creation, you inherently take a side against destruction. You’re on the side of creation. And that does a lot to quell the impulse to destroy. Creativity eats darkness.” Tweedy saw the veritable tsunami of strife, fascism, genocide, and all the other ills plaguing the world, and put up arms against it by means of art. For me, and for so many people who feel helpless, it’s all we can do. My mom shared this wonderful Ted Talk by Amie McNee about how making any kind of art, political or not, is an act of resistance in this hellscape just by virtue of the fact that you’re putting your time and attention into creativity and not giving money to corporations by endlessly scrolling on social media or participating in other capitalist activities. It comes to mind when I think about the upcoming Twilight Override: now that’s an act of resistance. 30 songs! That monstrous length is also intentional to Tweedy: “Whatever it is out there (or in there) squeezing this ennui into my day, it’s fucking overwhelming. It’s difficult to ignore. Twilight Override is my effort to overwhelm it right back. Here are the songs and sounds and voices and guitars and words that are an effort to let go of some of the heaviness and up the wattage on my own light. My effort to engulf this encroaching nighttime (nightmare) of the soul.” 30 songs is hard to keep consistency with, but nevertheless, I welcome Jeff Tweedy as the musical champion of (twi)light in the overwhelming darkness.

Out of the four singles that have been released so far, “One Tiny Flower” seems most like Tweedy’s mission statement with Twilight Override. It’s not his most lyrically complex song, but it evokes the most classic imagery of resistance and resilience possible: a tiny flower sprouting out from the concrete. It’s an ember of joy, a labor of intensive hard work to make the roots hold onto concrete, and a fuck you to whoever poured the concrete over the space where they didn’t want more plants to grow. Even without the rest of Wilco, “One Tiny Flower” reeks of Cousin, shifting from understated, softly sung acoustic melodies to a jingling, entropic dissolution before straightening itself back up again. The other three songs veer between different sides of Tweedy’s range, but if there are any more songs like this one, then I’ll be satisfied with Twilight Override.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Half-Built Garden – Ruthanna Emrys – a quiet, hopeful tale of climate change and first contact.

“Psychosis is Just a Number” – Guerilla Toss

I’m surprised that I’ve never talked about Guerilla Toss on any of these posts, but I think it’s mainly because my main heyday listening to them ended right around the time when I started making these graphics, several months after their last album, Famously Alive, came out. I don’t tend to habitually revisit them, minus most of the tracks from Twisted Crystal (see: “Come Up With Me,” which I swear needs to be the theme song for a quirky Cartoon Network show with a plucky girl protagonist on a bicycle exploring a magical realm). But even though I’d never place them among my most-listened to bands, I’m always happy to hear something new from them. You’re Weird Now comes out this October, but the truth is, Guerilla Toss have been weird all along—and that’s what makes them special. They’re doing nothing but their own thing, pasting together surreal lyrics with electronic and rock beats frankensteined together. “Psychosis Is Just a Number” mashes together thrumming bass and a surprisingly smooth brass section—I’d never think to compare Oingo Boingo and Guerilla Toss musically, but the madcap, off-the-walls excitement of this track is so wonderfully reminiscent of them. They throw everything at you (the chorus is borderline overstimulating if you listen to it over and over) but that’s just how their unfiltered, raw excitement and creativity shines through.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Finna – Nino Cipri – this is a highly specific situation, but strangely, Guerilla Toss seems like the ideal soundtrack to being trapped in an interdimensional, legally distinct IKEA full of monstrous furniture.

“The Width of a Circle” – David Bowie

I’ve loved “The Width of a Circle” for at least a few years, and I’ve been interested in learning how to play it on guitar. Unfortunately, though it has been a wonderful experience, I made a…uh, slight oversight, and didn’t realize how painfully awkward it would be to be in my guitar lesson and have my guitar teacher go through the whole “He swallowed his pride and puckered his lips/And showed me the leather bound ’round his hips” bit. Whoops.

As you probably gathered, “The Width of a Circle” is about as freaky as they come. Though the actual subject is somewhat ambiguous, it’s about Bowie encountering either God or Satan…and proceeding to have the most earth-shattering gay sex with him. (I’m more inclined to the Satan interpretation, as the figure fools the Bowie character into thinking he’s a humble, young God, then opens up the pits of Hell.) Even though The Man Who Sold the World didn’t get a ton of attention when it came out, it’s impressive that this got through any kind of censors and was released all the way back in 1970—just as impressive as the fact that Bowie was slaying in that dress on the front cover of the album. It’s honestly one of the queerest songs in his catalogue to me, and this was even before he made a whole album about a queer alien. The Man Who Sold the World didn’t gain much notoriety until Bowie’s career started picking up in earnest, but in retrospect, it’s the album where his storytelling really took a turn for the truly artful. Though the sound isn’t as cohesive, you can see the leap he took into going more daring places with his songwriting. “The Width of a Circle” truly is an epic in every sense of the word; originally two separate songs, it was tied together by the connective tissue of Mick Ronson’s jamming, expanding it into an eight minute long behemoth of a tale. The theatricality that would come to dominate Bowie’s work in only a few years blossoms here as he takes a journey through innocence and into shock and revelation. Even if it came to my disadvantage in that guitar lesson, this is the first time in Bowie’s career where his imagery takes on the quality of being so startlingly evocative—he’s a master of weaving worlds through song, and whether or not he’s selling them, each song is a Faberge egg of allusions and stunning songcraft.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Familiar – Leigh Bardugo – “And I cried for all the others until the day was nearly through/For I realized that God’s a young man too…”

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

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: 3/30/25

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: new music from 2025—both released this year and overheard before a Soccer Mommy show.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 3/30/25

“Triumph of a Heart” – Björk

I’ve finished the Sonic Symbolism podcast, and all it’s left me with is a rabid desire to do a deep dive of the rest of Björk’s albums. Medúlla is enticing as it’s the next one chronologically (even though I’ve given up on listening to her albums chronologically), but also because of the uniting concept behind it. Inspired by primal, prehistoric imagery of motherhood, family, and storytelling around campfires, Medúlla was constructed almost entirely from the human voice. Aside from some synths and piano, it’s almost all a-capella, but not in the way that you’d think. Each voice becomes percussion, scattered onomatopoeia, and rising tidal forces that lift something primal from your soul. And every possible voice ends up featuring on this album—Tanya Tagaq (throat singing), Rahzel, Dokaka (beatboxing), and Mike Patton (deep backing vocals that Pitchfork described as “demonic”) all feature in the varied vocal tapestry. I ended up being too busy to write about “Pleasure Is All Mine,” but that song, in its simultaneous feminist ode and playful toying with women’s capacity to be selfless, really does succeed in digging into something innate, almost instinctual within me.

In concept, “Triumph of a Heart” is almost as ridiculous as the music video. (Fun fact: Björk’s cat husband in this video spawned the “I should buy a boat” meme from way back when.) Forming the percussion of the song, alongside Dokaka’s melodic beatboxing, is what can only be described as restrained raspberry noises and sounds that are almost akin to somebody who’s only heard a cat once trying to make cat sounds. Yet it all works in such a familiar yet alien synchronicity that comes together in a way that only Björk can make it. The track is an ode to how music can make you feel and the joy of dancing, a pleasure shared since early humans were able to whack sticks together and harmonize around the fire; maybe it’s an obvious choice for this album, but using only bodily instrumentation is the perfect medium to explore the visceral nature of music and dance, the way that it sometimes vibrates your soul: “The nerves are sending shimmering signals/All through my fingers/The veins support/Blood that gushes impulsively towards/The triumph of a heart.” I always see such sentiments of people undervaluing the arts, even as they consume it by the truckload and think nothing of it; it’s not a viable, useful profession, more fodder for AI and mindless listening. It’s so easy for us to forget that art in all its forms, the same as the need for medicine and food, is innate to us, and has been since we were gathered in the shelter of the first fires.

As a bonus: here’s some behind the scenes footage of the recording of “Pleasure Is All Mine”:

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Binti – Nnedi Okorafor – this novella also falls into that merging of preserving cultures that have survived for thousands of years and alien technology, and it blends into a bizarre, delightful trilogy.

“Honey Water” – Japanese Breafkast

For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) sadly fell under the She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She curse on this blog, which roughly translates to “I wanted to write about at least 2-3 of the singles, but they all ended up landing on weeks where I didn’t have time to write.” Shame, really, because “Orlando in Love” and “Mega Circuit” were silk-drapingly romantic and creepily artful, respectively. Now that I’ve listened to the whole album, at its best, it embodies those qualities, oscillating from semi-autobiographical, tragic stories to some of the more fictional songwriting that Michelle Zauner drew on for Jubilee. She simultaneously leans into the notion of the “sad girl” while critiquing the fact that women are so often pigeonholed into this description (see the title), embroidering her own dramatic melancholy with orchestral arrangements and references to Greek mythology. Though it wasn’t always successful and the end dragged (see: “Men in Bars,” an faux-earnest, ballad-y duet with…Jeff Bridges? Huh?), For Melancholy Brunettes was, for the most part, an artistic leap that was a good 75%-80% successful in its feats of daring. It acknowledges its place amongst the traditionally emotional role of female musicians, but also acknowledges the light that peers in through the cracks (see: “Here Is Someone”—for maximum enjoyment, transition it with “Frosti” by Björk).

“Honey Water” was one of the standout tracks. I never thought of Japanese Breakfast as someone who could necessarily conjure up eeriness. Sure, she’s written plenty about all manner of unpleasant feelings, but I’ve never gotten dread as one of the most prominently featured ones. Zauner’s signature, breathy whisper takes on the feeling of a carnivorous plant laden with dew, ready to ensnare all manner of insects. Yet she’s not the one doing the ensnaring in this song—the narrative, toeing the line between fiction and reality, as her songs often do, speaks of an unfaithful lover repeatedly leaving her for someone else: “The lure of honey water draws you from my arms so needy/You follow in colonies to sip it from the bank/In rapturous sweet temptation, you wade in past the edge and sink in/Insatiable for a nectar, drinking ’til your heart expires.” The dread that Zauner dredges up is more a kind of stagnation, the sinking feeling of seeing the inevitable unfold around you, and yet somehow feeling powerless to move—or leave. The closing refrain, as the guitars rise in a crashing, insectoid drone, echoes Slaughterhouse-Five’s famous tidbit: “So it goes/I don’t mind”; the narrator convinces herself that all of her partner’s unfaithful transgressions are a fact of life. That tired powerlessness is what makes the dread so palpable, the music swallowing her as she mutters the last repetition of her exhausted mantra.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Familiar – Leigh Bardugo – “In rapturous sweet temptation, you wade in past the edge and sink in/Insatiable for a nectar, drinking ’til your heart expires…”

“God Knows” – Tunde Adebimpe

Remember how I was halfway chiding myself for hoping that Thee Black Boltz was just going to be TV on the Radio 2: Electric Boogaloo? Now that “God Knows” is out, I think that might honestly just be what the album is like regardless of expectations. “Magnetic” introduced us to a familiar, nostalgic sound full of energy, “Drop” was the point where Adebimpe seems to diverge, and now we’ve got “God Knows,” which sounds straight off of Nine Types of Light or even Dear Science. It’s giving me some perspective on how much Adebimpe made TV on the Radio—Dave Sitek constructed the scaffolding, but Adebimpe was the heart of it all, without a doubt. Balancing sharp acoustic strumming with synths that ripple and bubble, this track adds to “Drop” in the sense that both songs feel like they’re floating. It fits with the album cover for me—as Adebimpe clings to his geode island in the middle of an undefined void, he’s buoyed through it, like an ocean, propelled by nothing but the endlessly catchy hooks he’s been producing of late. “God Knows” stands out to me as the strongest of the three offerings so far—like “Magnetic,” it’s been sharpened to its tightest point to make indie rock tracks that wouldn’t be out of place 10 or even 20 years ago. Tunde is timeless.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Full Speed to a Crash Landing – Beth Revis – “God knows you’re the worst thing I’ve ever loved/And you’re bad news/But we still got to have our fun…”

“Whole Love” – Wilco

Man, YouTube comments are so funny sometimes. I hope the Latina woman who posted “I love this white song, don’t tell my homegirls I listen to this” is doing okay and still listening to Wilco happily. Wilco really is the great unifier.

Here’s an album that I’ve probably listened to in full, but only remember about half of. The Whole Love soundtracked many a car ride to school or piano lessons and whatnot back in 2011. I even remember popping my dad’s borrowed CD into my old Hello Kitty CD player while I was playing with my Build-A-Bears in my room. That should give you a picture of the kind of hipster child I was, but I digress. The resulting tour was also the first time I saw Wilco—and my very first concert, at Red Rocks at the age of eight. So even if I haven’t mapped it out fully, The Whole Love was integral to my childhood, whether it was watching the music video for “Born Alone” on my dad’s old laptop (I distinctly remember saying that it “made my head spin”) or sitting on my dad’s shoulders on that summer night. Really, it boils down to my dad. Raising me on all that Wilco made me turn out alright, I think.

Back to “Whole Love” in particular. The song already carries a metric ton of nostalgia for me, but it never gets old with any successive playing. As far as The Whole Love goes, it feels like one of the more accessible tracks—it’s classic Wilco, but with the artsy twist that the album presents. There’s a passage in Steven Hyden’s This Isn’t Happening: Radiohead’s ‘Kid A’ and the Beginning of the 21st Century that talks about the significance of album openers setting the tone for the album as a whole. Hyden points to “Art of Almost” as an example—with all of the Thom Yorke-esque synth weirdness, it signals to the listener that this is gonna be the weird Wilco album. That experimental nature leeches into the most “accessible” sounding tracks—like this one. Even as Jeff Tweedy brings his gentle, acoustic sway into fruition, the background can only be described as fluttering—they jitter and judder like the freshly-dried wings of just-hatched butterflies, creating tiny fractals in the background. Yet even if you stripped that weirdness away, “Whole Love” would still be a classic—whether it’s craft or my nostalgia talking, there’s something so innately comforting about the layered harmonies, folded on top of one another like layers of fine fabric.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Heart of the World (The Isles of the Gods, #2) – Amie Kaufman – “And I know that I won’t be/The easiest to set free/And I know that I won’t be the last/Cold captain tied to the mast…”

“Get Away” – Yuck

This song played before Soccer Mommy came on when I saw her a few weeks back, and for a split second, I confused it for some Apples in Stereo song that I somehow hadn’t heard in my childhood. Turns out, there’s probably no Apples in Stereo song that I missed when I was a kid, hence why I didn’t recognize it. (Cut me some slack, it was loud in there…) Yuck doesn’t have the same electronically-oriented whimsy as the Apples in Stereo, but they seemed to branch off of the indie sound of the early 2010’s, with their synth-like guitars, ’90s distortion, and the nasally vocals of Daniel Blumberg. Those guitars were what made me nearly mistake them for the Apples in Stereo, but they’re clearly more students of, say, Sonic Youth or Dinosaur Jr. But they had that sun-soaked, 2010’s indie aesthetic down to a science; even without the yellow filter on their music video, “Get Away” just oozes the sensation of a dream of being on a road with no speed limits while the sun beats down through the windshield. Even as Blumberg laments that he can’t get away, wrestling with negative thoughts, the track speeds along with a carefree freedom, kicking up gravel as it forges its own path. Certainly fits right in with Soccer Mommy’s sound too—she’s got an eye for good indie, that’s for sure….

…and so does the Academy, apparently? You’re telling me that this guy just won an Oscar for his original score for The Brutalist? That’s a connection I didn’t expect to make in this post…good for you, Daniel Blumberg!

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester – Maya MacGregor – “Summer sun says get out more/I need you, I want you/But I can’t get this feeling off my mind/I want you, I need you…”

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: 3/2/25

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: were it not for me yapping about Horsegirl earlier this week, this post would be unfathomably long…sorry. Stick around for my rambling hitting concerning levels the minute I have more free time.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 3/2/25

“Less Than You Think” – Wilco

Since A Ghost Is Born got its anniversary reissue a few weeks back, I took the time to listen to the album in its entirety for the first time…surprising, I know! That being said, I’d basically listened to all but two tracks on the album, but I hadn’t gotten to listen to it all the way through in the right order. After a childhood being fed Wilco by my dad about as much as I was fed milk as a baby (both were nourishing and necessary for my development), only two tracks remained: “Wishful Thinking” and this track. It’s songs like “Less Than You Think” that make me remember how much of a poet Jeff Tweedy is. I don’t say that about every singer; in the abstract, music is poetry set to song, but it doesn’t often feel that way. In this case, it’s understandable that the poetry of “Less Than You Think” gets lost in the other masterpieces in Wilco’s catalogue. But it’s not just a case of an underrated track—there’s a reason this one gets lost in the fray so often. For three minutes, it’s any normal Wilco song—one of their sadder ballads, but standard Wilco fare…

…and then you realize that there’s 12 minutes left.

That 12 minutes is entirely composed of a shrill, grating stretch of electronic droning and background noise from the studio. To say that it’s excruciating to listen to, especially with the volume up after listening to the actual song part, is almost an understatement. It’s unpleasant in every sense of the word. Yet that’s precisely the point. Not to be the “🤓☝️ erm ackshually, this nigh-unlistenable 12 minutes of noise has a deep meaning that’s essential to the understanding of the song,” but…it does. It’s unlistenable because it’s meant to be unlistenable—Tweedy and the rest of the band used this song to recreate the experience of having chronic migraines, a condition Tweedy has had all his life, but was exacerbated by his painkiller addiction: “I don’t know why anyone would need to have that expressed to them musically. But it was all I had.” Tweedy put “Less Than You Think” out anyway, knowing that it’d be “the track everyone will hate,” saying that “I know ninety-nine percent of our fans won’t like that song, they’ll say its a ridiculous indulgence. Even I don’t want to listen to it every time I play through the album. But the times I do calm myself down and pay attention to it, I think it’s valuable and moving and cathartic. I wouldn’t have put it on the record if I didn’t think it was great.” And he’s right. Being so experimental with this catharsis brings us so much closer to the experience than words ever could, as much as a master wordsmith as Tweedy is. Catharsis for a pain as profound as this doesn’t have to be listenable or tolerable to be worth putting out into the world—it’s catharsis, after all. Sure, I’ve skipped it every time I’ve listened to it since, but once again…that’s the point. We’re meant to sympathize with Tweedy’s pain, but even he admits that it’s not exactly easy listening. (Some absolutely diabolical individual in the YouTube comments called it “the best song to tee up on the bar jukebox right before you leave…” Satan, is that you?)

But that glorious, incandescent three minutes before you get the worst headache you’ve ever experienced? Deeply moving, in an entirely different way. They got me. They got me good with the sad bastard music. The piano is played with such a heaviness that you can only imagine it being played with lead weights strapped to each finger. Delicate taps of the dulcimer climb up an invisible ladder, each strike coinciding with Tweedy’s repetition of “Lightly tapping/a high-pitched drum.” And for a song that Tweedy knew would be an instant skip for most of his listener, he packed it with some of A Ghost is Born‘s most downright poetic lyrics:

“As your spine starts to shine
You shiver at your soul
A fist so clear and climbing
Punches a hole in the sky
So you can see
For yourself
If you don’t believe me
There’s so much less
To this than you think…”

Yeah, I pulled a Lisa Hannigan again. I’m tempted to just copy and paste all of the lyrics. Punches a hole in the sky? More like punches a hole in my soul, ow. Though the lyrics toy with the chaos of the universe and the clarity of realizing that maybe everything hasn’t been choreographed by a higher power, I can’t help but connect it with Tweedy’s migraines—all the talk of shivering and “Your mind’s a machine” sounds an awful lot how I imagine living with both migraines and addiction must feel: a cycle of dullness and excruciating pain, exposing how much of the brain has been devoted to going through the motions. As for the solemn resignation to atheism, it connects to that experience—it seems pain that immeasurable makes you either seek out or entirely swear off of religion without a happy medium. With or without words, Tweedy conjures a pain he had to exorcise from his person, yet is able to resonate if you’re willing to dig through the earth to find it. Sometimes you have to make art from agony in order to make the burden lighter, whether or not you give it to the world. In any case, Jeff Tweedy makes the pain worth weathering.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Two Girls Staring at the Ceiling – Lucy Frank – told in sparse verse, these two characters go through a similar pain as they work through chronic pain diagnoses in the same hospital.

“Big Time Sensuality” – Björk

Today, on: Madeline listens to Björk’s discography wildly out of order…we’ve come to Debut. It’s another one of those albums that I’d listened to about half of already, but it was just track after track of honed energy and happiness…seriously, this album couldn’t have come at a better time in my life. I think listening to Post about this time last year and Debut now feel aligned with my life in some way. A lot of Björk’s experience at the time was drawn from moving from Iceland to the UK in her late twenties, and being adventurous, putting out her feelers, and embracing the newness of it all, taking everything in (see: “Enjoy”). In some ways, I feel a connection to that kind of exploration. Now that I’ve shed most of the apprehension of freshman year (though definitely not all), I feel like I’m slowly beginning to grow into a new place, a new home, a new environment. I know I’m a little dramatic about that…I’m going to a college that’s less than an hour away from my hometown, so I can’t quite compare. But there came a time when I realized I was living in a whole new place, and I’d barely scratched the surface of everything in it. After the initial crisis, I’ve begun dragging my friends to whatever new place that I can find. Baby steps, but I’m slowly cataloguing new restaurants that I’ve tried. New routes to class. New coffee places on campus, now that Starbucks jumped on the DEI-stripping bandwagon. I’m not throwing myself headfirst into a new city, immersing myself in the early ’90s rave nightlife like Björk did, but I can’t help but connect to that apprehension, that excitement of really knowing you’re somewhere new, physically and emotionally. I’d do well to take it to heart the more I grow up.

“Big Time Sensuality” embodies Björk’s absorption of ’90s house music while in London, and even though it’s far from the weirdest part of her catalogue, you can’t take the weird out of Björk. Even amidst the house beats behind her, you can’t erase the skyrocketing highs and growls that, even for her firs solo effort, were already staples of her vocal style. Despite what the title would have you believe, there’s nothing necessarily sexual about it, yet it retains the ecstasy you’d think it would have. This ecstasy, however, comes from a common theme on Debut: reaching out and taking risks to soak the fullest out of life: “I don’t know my future after this weekend/And I don’t want to.” Its heart is imbued with the rush of friendship, throwing your passion into your music, and independence in a few environment: Björk told David Hemingway that the song’s inspiration came from “[Creating] pretty deep, full-on love relationships with friends…I can be a coward a lot of the time and there comes a moment when I write a song when I get quite brave.” “Big Time Sensuality” throws itself face first into uncharted waters, all with a dimple-stretching grin. Björk’s already diverse vocal range embodies the chorus of “It takes courage to enjoy it/The hardcore and the gentle.” And the music video, directed by Stéphane Sednaoui, embodies that daring joy, with Björk dancing on the back of a truck bed driving through New York City, baring her grin for all to see.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers, #2) – Becky Chambers – Lovelace’s journey of having a body, separating herself from her old identity, and being a part of the sapient world mirrors much of the eager excitement of Debut.

“I Am The Fly” – Wire

All the cool people like Wire. I’m not saying that to assert that I’m [snaps fingers] hip (that alone proves that I’m really not). It’s more that if you rattle off any creative, clever band from the past three to four decades, they all name Wire as an influence–Sonic Youth, R.E.M., and Soundgarden are just a handful of people touched by their music, and you can hear their genealogy in grunge, hardcore punk, and even Britpop. (Heavy on the Britpop. See Elastica’s “Line Up,” one of several songs that Wire took Elastica to court over claims of plagiarism.) Want proof? How about Wire playing with Jon Spencer and St. Vincent back in 2015? See what I mean? They’re the great uniters. All the cool people like Wire.

For all intents and purposes, Wire left their more punk sound behind with Pink Flag (see “12XU”), trading it for a minimalist, synth-dominated sound on Chairs Missing. To my ear, it sounds like the musical equivalent of brutalism; to the touch, every texture is rough as concrete, but every edge is sanded down to absolute straightness. Graham Lewis’ thick bass dominates the sound, rippled through with guitars, handclaps, and a wall of synth so dense that it becomes more percussion than the actual drums. I can’t help but hear some leftover punk not in the sound, but in the lyrics. Houseflies don’t sound particularly punk at first glance (nor does Graham Lewis’ apparent thing for writing about winged insects on this album)—they’re more for being stepped on by a pair of massive docs than the subject of a song. But yet, this simple animal becomes so deeply punk: “I am the fly in the ointment/I can spread more disease than the fleas/Which nibble away at your window display.” At its core, punk is has always been about disruption, whether that’s in the abrasive quality of the music or grating against the establishment. A fly is a fundamental nuisance, a tiny speck of a creature that, as the song says, spreads disease so easily, ripping up the threads in the fabric of something pristine and perfect. No matter how many swings you take at them with a flyswatter, they always come out, reproducing rapidly…just like disease, and just like resistance. Even with the dry intonation of the lyrics, it reads to me as a deeply proud song, a finger crossed behind the back and a smirk on the face as the time bomb counts down its last second. It’s a promise, and it’s a declaration of purpose: disturbance.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Countess – Suzan Palumbo – “But there’s an air-pellet hole/I can crawl through to you/I am the fly in the ointment/I can spread more disease than the fleas/Which nibble away at your window display…”

“Frontrunner” – Horsegirl

See my review of Horsegirl’s new album, Phonetics On and On; bottom line, I LOVE HORSEGIRL. WE ARE BETTER FOR THEIR EXISTENCE.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

If You Still Recognize Me – Cynthia So – “In the morning, when you’re sleeping/I can’t wait and I can’t wait to compromise…”

“Amelia” – Cocteau Twins

How does it feel? How does it feel for those of you with the right names to share a name with a Cocteau Twins track? For all of the Loreleis, Amelias, Beatrixes, Ivos, Carolyns, etc…do you realize how lucky you are?

Out of all of the Cocteau Twins songs I’ve heard, “Amelia” is one that embodies their general qualities the most, taken almost to an extreme. Regardless of whether or not I could hear the lyrics even if they weren’t nonsensical, they’re sunken so deep into the production that they become a kind of fog-like mist. The unmoored, bass-less flow of the track reminds me of something off of Victorialand, a record where bassist Simon Raymonde was notably missing. Liz Fraser’s vocals are as textural as ever, uttering a whole menagerie throat-fluttering bird calls amidst a barrage of gated reverb that descends upon you like the patter of heavy rain on a windshield. Next to some of their other tracks, it feels slightly less cohesive—the intensity of the gated reverb, reverb’d into high heaven as it is, doesn’t completely mesh with the airiness of the vocals or the other instrumentation. Somehow, it’s almost comforting—the Cocteau Twins stand out to me as a band who truly found their niche and stuck to it, digging in their heels to make that niche as unique and them as possible in the most artistic and adventurous way. Weirdly, it comforts me that it took them time to get their rhythm down, and even then, their earlier steps still blow me away. “Amelia” certainly does—the sheer variety of vocal styles that Fraser layers over one another is proof that even on a record that the band famously hated, their nascent talent couldn’t help but shine in its own way.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Meru – S.B. Divya – I can only imagine that the experience of being a god-like Alloy and floating in space sounds something like the Cocteau Twins.

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

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

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (2/11/25) – The Maid and the Crocodile

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I had a ton of fun with Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer duology, but somehow I completely missed that she released a novel last August in the same universe! It was an absolute treat to be back in Ifueko’s world, and The Maid and the Crocodile proved a valuable asset to her fantasy universe.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Maid and the Crocodile – Jordan Ifueko

Small Sade is desperate for any job that she can find. With her crooked foot and vitiligo, the people of her village think she is cursed and touched by spirits. Eventually, she finds work as a maid, but not before an act of desperation sees her bound to a powerful god, known only as the Crocodile. As she moves up in the ranks, she realizes that she is a Curse Eater—her profession as a maid not only cleans the houses of her clients, but changes their fates. Juggling her newfound ability and a world on the brink of revolution with only the Crocodile as her guide, Small Sade must learn to forge her own path before someone else decides it for her.

TW/CW: ableism, self-harm/mentions of suicide, descriptions of injuries, classism, mentions of sexual assault, abuse, loss of loved ones

I can excuse a handful of pop culture references here and there, but after that god-awful Minecraft trailer, if I hear “the children yearn for the mines” ONE MORE TIME, I’m gonna snap…Jordan Ifueko, this was a great book, but that tested me…especially with the climactic scene that it temporarily undercut.

That aside, it was an absolute treat to return to the world of Raybearer with The Maid and the Crocodile! I didn’t think to re-read the duology before going back into it (I never seem to do that unless it’s with a book I’m really invested in), but I was so easily immersed into the world nonetheless! For both casual and eagle-eyed readers, there are Easter eggs aplenty—several characters from the duology make cameo appearances (SANJEET!!! MY GUY!!!!), and the nuances of the world stay the same, for the most part. It was an easy transition, which isn’t always easy to do. I loved how The Maid and the Crocodile expanded on the world as well! Ifueko really has a strength in writing ordinary characters forced into extraordinary, powerful positions, and Small Sade is no exception. However, she’s much more different than Tarisai, which I appreciated—there’s much more of a sense of her having to work towards the top, and her humored yet determined tenacity was what made her so special of a character. Through her, we see Oluwan City from more ordinary eyes, which makes the themes of the story so much more clearer.

I couldn’t have read The Maid and the Crocodile at a better time, and not just because it was a fun read. Its themes about the nature of change and revolution are critical—IT’S ALL ABOUT LOVE! It’s so refreshing to see a character who wants to help society change for the better not out of revenge or a vague “evil government bad [does not elaborate]” motivation, but out of love. Small Sade’s motives stem from wanting to care for the people she loves and wanting to see that love reciprocated in the world around her. Change rooted from love is a perspective that I rarely see in YA, even though its plots have centered around dismantling governments and revolutionary change for decades. I’m so tired of saying “in times like these,” but I mean it—in times like these, narratives about radical change being rooted in love—for your people, for your country, and for your culture—are critical to understanding what change can truly do.

Whenever you have a disabled character in a non-modern setting, even if it’s fantasy, you always run the risk of amping up the internalized ableism. Small Sade, who is shunned and deemed “spirit-touched” because of her crooked foot (she uses a cane for mobility) and her vitiligo, faces a great deal of ableism. It’s not as though plots about overcoming ableism (NOT the disability, mind you) aren’t worth telling, but in non-modern and fantasy settings, it does get slightly tired to have all disabled characters in these settings go through versions of the same arc. I loved how Ifueko handled Small Sade’s character—she resists ableism, but most importantly, she is a person beyond her experiences of ableism. Her experience of discrimination informs her story, but it is not the entirety of her character. Small Sade is defiant, self-reliant, and deeply caring—she’s so fully-fleshed out, which is a rarity for disabled characters. So hats off to Ifueko for an excellently-written disabled character!

However, though it had its moments, I was never fully invested in the romance between Small Sade and Zuri. I got that they had a connection, but I feel like he showed up too few times for the relationship to really work. Small Sade had eons more character development than he ever had the chance to. I get that a curse slowly turning you into a crocodile tends to do this to a guy, but at times Zuri felt rather codependent—up until the last 50 pages or so, Small Sade felt more like a means to an end for him, and his redemption was too underdeveloped for me to be fully invested in it. I appreciated their mutual resolution, but it was too late for it to feel fully satisfying. Given how strongly written the relationship between Sanjeet and Tarisai was in the Raybearer duology, I really expected Ifueko to deliver more with The Maid and the Crocodile. Small Sade and Zuri had moments, but not enough for me to be invested in them romantically.

All in all, a worthy addition to Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer universe, full of heart, curses, and hope. 3.75 stars, rounded up to 4!

The Maid and the Crocodile is a standalone, but is set in the world of the Raybearer duology (Raybearer and Redemptor). Jordan Ifueko is also the author of the 2022-2023 run of Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, and has also contributed to Jim Henson’s Storyteller: Tricksters.

Today’s song:

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: 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: 7/21/24

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: music for pretentious weirdos (me), music for animation, and music that makes me cry on the regular.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 7/21/24

“Dirt on the Bed” – Cate Le Bon

I came into Pompeii with plenty of curiosity, having finally gotten around to listening to Cate Le Bon after hearing her work producing Wilco’s latest album, Cousin, and her vocal feature on St. Vincent’s “All Born Screaming.” Vaguely remembering the buzz and air of weirdness around Pompeii, I decided to listen to it first.

Pompeii and “Dirt on the Bed” have reminded me of why a spectacular album intro can be both a blessing and a curse. If nothing surpasses the first track, then the rest of the album can never recover—or at least reach the heights of the first song. You can enjoy yourself, but never as much as you did after one song. Just one. It’s a horrible dilemma. Pompeii was fantastic from the start, but after the first four songs, nothing’s quite the same—great, but like my experience with R.E.M.’s Green, nothing tops the back-to-back splendor of the first four songs. And that splendor is set in motion by the crawling intro, “Dirt on the Bed.” As the title suggests, it has the dread of something unclean creeping into the house, like a nun on the scent of sin in a shuttered Catholic girl’s school. An off-kilter, stumbling chorus of brass blooms in moldy bursts, an airborne sickness pulsating through each thrum of the bass. Now I know exactly why St. Vincent chose to work with Le Bon—”Dirt on the Bed” is especially evidence of this, but all I could think of during Pompeii is that it felt like St. Vincent had remained lyrically and instrumentally in Actor, but slowly adorned her music with synths. They’re so similar to each other, down to their folkier, precocious indie beginnings that blossomed into full-on devotion to strangeness. This is modern art pop at some of its best, unabashedly weird and precise in every flourish. “Dirt on the Bed” makes even more sense when you see it as a product of a pandemic-produced album; it paces listlessly, putting on a smile as it tries to scrub every trace of illness and dread from a spotless house. Even as calmly as Le Bon sings each lyric, foreboding seeps through every misty horn blast.

That’s how an album intro is done. After several more listens, I’d say that nothing comes quite as close to it, but “Dirt on the Bed,” “Moderation,” “French Boys,” and “Pompeii” is SUCH an undefeated stretch of songs. Pompeii is worth a listen just for that, as is the album’s very St. Vincent closer, “Wheel.”

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Drunk on All Your Strange New Words – Eddie Robson – “Sound doesn’t go away/In habitual silence/It reinvents the surface/Of everything you touch…”

“Poor Song” – Yeah Yeah Yeahs

…okay, I can’t possibly be normal about this because I cry a little every time I hear it. Either way, there’s an undiluted purity about this song that makes any kind of analysis feel like ten steps in the wrong direction. It’s a paramount example of how easily beauty and simplicity can intertwine, and it cuts more deeply than some songs I know with hundreds of metaphors.

It’s very nearly perfect. Karen O tends to do that.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

I Love This Part – Tillie Walden – quiet and gentle teenage romance.

“It’s A Wonderful Life” – Sparklehorse

One of the first times I remember hearing this song was in the car with my dad, as I come across many a good song. Looking back, since I was so young, it must have been a trip back into Sparklehorse’s catalogue shortly after Mark Linkous’ tragic passing. But as we drove home that night, the windows buffeted by snow or sleet, my dad made a wry remark about the lyrics: “he’s not feeling too good, huh?”

With every emotion comes an infinite number of ways to express it, not just confined to song. There’s the kind of songwriting that outright says that you’re sad, while others cloak it in metaphor. Neither is better than the other, but what Mark Linkous did feels like a category all its own, albeit closer to category #2. Many of the lyrics of “It’s A Wonderful Life” (if there was ever a more sarcastic title) are nonsensical, as his lyrics often are (“I wore a rooster’s blood/When it flew like doves”), but nestled between these impenetrable tidbits, the ones that do make sense land like anvils to the gut. I’ve never heard such sadness and shame articulated in the line “I’m the dog that ate your birthday cake.” Dare I say it’s one of my favorite song lyrics ever? It’s up there, just for such an unadorned, bare line to have such an instantly devastating effect; You can picture that dog, not knowing that it’s not supposed to eat human food and not processing that there’s a child sobbing at their ruined birthday, but being able to detect the shame all the same, but never know the reason why. It cowers, but it doesn’t know why it’s feeling this way. Linkous delivers it with all of that shame, clouded in the atmospheric cage of keyboards that prickle with heat lightning.

With that kind of lyricism, it came as a massive shock that this wasn’t one of his classic pieces of melancholy. In fact, Linkous wrote it as a jab at critics who panned an image of overarching depression over his catalogue: “I got fed up with people in America thinking that my music is morose and depressing and all that. That song is like a “fuck you” to journalists, or people who are not smart enough to see what it is.” And…listen, I’m a guilty party. I still think that Sparklehorse is one of the preeminent purveyors of high-quality sad bastard music, and he had enough strife in his life to justify every tear-jerking lyric. Yet this new light makes the lyrics I thought were nonsensical fall into place. Linkous describes the rest of the song as follows: “In the end, it was more about how every day, you should pick up something, no matter how minuscule or microscopic it is, and when you go to bed, you can say I was glad that I was alive to see that. That’s really what it’s about.” Wearing rooster’s blood when it flew like doves becomes a fleeting, once-in-a-lifetime capture of lightning in a bottle, and being the only one who can ride that horse th’yonder suddenly rings out as a humbly sung badge of honor. It was never sarcastic—it’s a wonderful life. I won’t ever be able to hear “I’m the dog that ate your birthday cake” without the sadness it insinuates, so maybe I’m just as much a part of the problem as the journalists he was taking a shot at, but the main takeaway for me is how versatile of a lyricist he is—if you look closely enough, he makes the absurdities of life both tragic and humbly hopeful.

Either way you absorb “It’s A Wonderful Life,” you can’t deny how otherworldly it sounds. Even years after I first heard and subsequently clung to this song, I can only name maybe one other artist who has ever come close to sounding like this—Lisa Germano, who, whether or not the two knew of each other, has a similar modus operandi of making music that sounded like rotting wood and empty doll’s heads. Lyrically and sonically, almost nobody sounds like Sparklehorse, and I suspect it’ll take a miracle for anyone to come close.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Perks of Being a Wallflower – Stephen Chbosky – Sparklehorse is no “Something,” but the crushing weight of depression and self-loathing comes across similarly.

“Girl from Germany” – Sparks

I’d heard bits and pieces of Sparks before, but like “Future Teenage Cave Artists” last week, I have Horsegirl and their episode of What’s In My Bag? to thank. Love those pretentious (affectionate) weirdos.

It seems I’ve only gotten through one strand in the massive haystack in terms of the INCREDIBLY prolific career of Sparks, which started in 1967 (under several different names) and had its most recent entry last year. Edgar Wright made a documentary about their musical exploits, and the list of artists they’ve influenced seems to span an infinite number of genres, all the way up to Horsegirl in 2023. So, having only heard two of their songs (including this one): hats off to you guys, really! Being that flagrantly weird for almost six decades is nothing short of impressive, and I can’t help but admire their musicianship in that regard.

“Girl from Germany” scratches my eternal itch for early-’70s glam rock, although it’s not all glam—it’s more glam in the sense that Brian Eno was glam at the same time, not quite like Bowie or Bolan were glam. Squeaky-clean, warm guitars as far as the eye can see and a healthy dose of theatricality cloaks this track make for a song that’s deliciously meticulous in every aspect. Russell Mael affects high-pitched vocals that wouldn’t be out of place in The Rocky Horror Picture Show while Ron Mael’s keyboard melodies glitter like light reflected off a glass of wine. And like Brian Eno, they used such a theatrical machine to touch on touchy subjects—in this case, in the climate of the early ’70s, bringing home a German girl to relatives who were mired in the horrors of World War II: “Well, the car I drive is parked outside, it’s German-made/They resent that less than the people who are German-made.” Even if every affectation is theatrical to the core, it’s still a prejudice that resurfaces today—assuming that any given person is an extension of the government and horrors of their homeland, and having to grapple with the cultural fallout of such a simple gesture of love.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Translation State – Ann Leckie – cross-cultural confusion and characters with heart.

“Hideaway” – The Olivia Tremor Control

Having only heard one song (this one) from Black Foliage: Animation Music, I’ve already logged it into my slipshod mental list of album titles that perfectly describe the music they contain. The Olivia Tremor Control have always been masters of musical density, making soundscapes that unfold like intricate pop-up books, each layer of noise a painted paper cutout in an endless jungle. “Hideaway,” so far, is the pinnacle of that density; with each successive strain of woozy, turn-of-the-century homage to ’60s psychedelia, you’re pulled into a lush forest of plants that unfold just enough to let the tiniest slivers of light through. It’s not just the black foliage that hits the mark so fittingly—the “animation music,” as Will Cullen Hart called it, is “all the stuff floating around…To me, that’s what [animation music] is: sort-of a sound and space, personified—just flying around to greet you in a friendly way.” All at once, the xylophone chimes and trumpet blasts give “Hideaway” the feel of both the colored-pencil animations in Fantastic Planet and the bouncing characters in Schoolhouse Rock!, a papery and breathless expedition into a darkened forest of cartoonish proportions.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Always Human – Ari North – simple, stylized art with vibrant colors—perfect for animation music.

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!