Tag: Wilco

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 9/27/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: everything’s a David Bowie reference if you’re neurodivergent enough. Plus, the ocean and the taxi are rainy, and you can’t believe or keep anything.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 9/27/26

“Ocean Rain” – Echo & The Bunnymen

Ocean Rain’s cover art is suited to the songs on it to an almost scientific degree: gothic and dark, with a canvas of deep indigos and blacks. Whoever made the decision to have the cover (photographed by Brian Griffin) in the Carnglaze Caverns should’ve gotten a raise. All of the tracks I’ve heard from the album (see also: “The Killing Moon,” “Nocturnal Me”…damn, remember when Stranger Things had meaningful and fun needle drops?) have the feel like the grand, orchestral arrangements are pinging off of the dappled light inside of a moonlit cavern.

This is probably kind of silly, considering that I’ve only listened to about half of Ocean Rain, but my hot take is that “Ocean Rain” would’ve been a way better opener than “Silver.” No shade to “Silver” (which has always reminded me of Wii Sports Resort music, weirdly…if Wii Sports Resort was goth), but I think this track lends itself more naturally to that classic, swelling build that more cinematic openers have. Whisper-quiet, “Ocean Rain” tiptoes in before launching into a slow-burn tale of storm-wracked seas—and minds: “All hands on deck at dawn/Sailing to sadder shores/Your port in my heavy storms/Harbors the blackest thoughts.” (I love the double meaning of “harbor” here—harboring thoughts, but then there’s the connection to the ocean/sailing imagery. Peak.) The more Ian McCulloch weaves the lyrics, the more his ocean begins to roil with crushing waves, a cry for help on a raft drifting further and further out to sea. But I doubt that it would be half as impactful without that expertly-timed, cinematic build, from McCulloch’s echoing vocals, almost a cappella, to his wail accompanied by the swells of an orchestra.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea – Rita Chang-Eppig – “I’m at sea again and now your hurricane/Have brought down this ocean rain/To bathe me again/My ship’s a-sail, can you hear its tender frame?/Screaming from beneath the waves…”

“Rainy Taxi” – Spoon

“Rainy Taxi” is a frantic love song for the end times. Amidst the kind of biblical apocalypse besetting the characters, Britt Daniel only has one thing on his mind: “Put on your red shoes; sing it to me, lover-girl/When you do, my love, I forget the world/And if you say ‘run,’ I may run with you/I’ve got nothing else, I’ve got nowhere else.” First off: I can’t not mention the nods to the David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” and its placement feels very intentional; in Daniel’s hands, “and if you say ‘run,’ I may run with you” is molded from a declaration of love to a sign to flee the oncoming end of the world and devotion as everything crumbles. The graying minor key and Alex Fischel’s spurts of discordant piano gives “Rainy Taxi” the anxious, precipice feel that at the slightest hint of danger, it’s time to bolt. By the outro, the characters presumably have run for the hills for good. Spoon isn’t a band that I’d usually think of with more sci-fi narratives like this, but their painting of the apocalypse is as good as any prog-rockers or metalheads; their nervy style translates effortlessly into the sky falling.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

If Tomorrow Doesn’t Come – Jen St. Jude – “I came home last night, I had no good news/And you’ve been sleeping through the brightest flash of apocalyptic ruin/And if you leave, I’ll never sing another tune…”

“I Can’t Believe” – The Apples in Stereo

The Apples in Stereo could rarely write a straight-up love song: there’s always a sci-fi element. Somebody’s a robot, somebody’s in space, et cetera. But that’s why I come back to them anyway—it was never a complaint. I thought that “I Can’t Believe” was one of those rare birds that didn’t include any of those elements until I listened more closely to the lyrics. What first appears to just be a classic case of an absent girlfriend turns into an absent girlfriend who’s also a time traveler: “She told me she came from tomorrow/And from a world far away, man/She told me leaves here this morning/Has she come back yesterday, man?” Yup. Just another Tuesday for Robert Schneider, apparently. It’s so perfect. It’s like the plot of some pulp comic from the ’60s.

And like the strange time loop that the girlfriend seems to be traveling through, “I Can’t Believe” is a song that I keep coming back to, over and over. There’s a timelessness to it, an instant clicking that feels rooted in classic rock elements but retains that signature Elephant 6 quirkiness. Something about the harmonies on the chorus—that repetition of “I can’t believe what she said to me,” before Schneider feinting silence on the last “what”—is so impeccably choreographed. Something really scratches an itch in my brain about the note change and Hilarie Sidney’s harmonies on the last repetition of the chorus before the verse starts again. The spacey synths and the crunched-up guitar riffs—it’s just a perfect pop song with a sci-fi twist, as is the mission of The Apples in Stereo.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Swift and Sudden Exit – Nico Vincenty – self-explanatory: time-traveling girlfriend.

“Can’t Keep Anything” – Cameron Winter

Alright, here I go. I feel like that meme of all of the identical Buzz Lightyear action figures in Toy Story, but oh my lord, Heavy Metal is a fantastic album. What people tend to gloss over is that it really isn’t the most palatable listen. The wise-beyond-its-years optimism of “Love Takes Miles” is the outlier. Whoopsies. Some of the songs are downright anxiety-inducing, like you’re standing on the unstable ground of a volcano about to blow its top; you’ll see a truly inspired lyric whizz by your head like shrapnel, but oh god, another piece of the ground just broke off into the lava flow and you’re precariously teetering on the edge. And then you fall down—that’s “$0” for you. After a certain threshold, Heavy Metal is completely untethered, hurtling towards some sort of chaotic, terminal doom, fully aware of its own destruction. It’s like witnessing somebody’s manic episode. I was honestly shaking a bit during that stretch between “Nina + Field of Cops” and “$0,” but thankfully, Cameron Winter finds a way to land the plane.

The best comparison I can make to Heavy Metal is Wilco’s masterpiece, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Not that the albums are fully comparable, since Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is easily a top 10 album for me, but Winter has that same spirit of Tweedy in terms of dressing up personal turmoil in intricately noisy compositions, whole worlds contained in three minutes. “Can’t Keep Anything” feels the most Wilco to me in its lyrics. As the closer to the album, it’s no “Reservations” (but what could ever be?), but Tweedy feels alive and well in the beat-up, tired self-reflection: “Walking and walking, you used up your feet…Begging and praying, you used up your knees.” After this pseudo-religious spiral desperately trying to win back affection (romantic? spiritual? artistic? all three?), Winter’s laid down his sword. In the many ways that self-deprecation manifests on Heavy Metal, this feels like the admission of defeat. Love, or whatever it may be, has slipped through his fingers, and this is his final acceptance of it. (I can’t help but thinking that the repetition of “I can’t give everything away” in the outro is a reference to the David Bowie song of the same name...cathedrals for those with eyes to see, etc. etc.). Musically, it’s much more subdued, with the soft plunking of the xylophones seeming to gently usher of Winter into the next stage of his life. It’s a gesture of futility and exhaustion, but also a kind of pledge to himself: he’s wasted all of this time going to inhuman lengths to pursue this something; from now on, there’s no use butchering pieces of himself. For an album that goes to such catastrophic highs and lows, it’s a sad ending, yet it feels like making peace with your mistakes. Whether or not he follows up on it, “I just can’t give everything away” feels like the binding of a pact: it’s over.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The River Has Roots – Amal El-Mohtar – “I don’t know where I’m going, babe/Wherever it is I’m going, baby/You’re going too/Baby, where I’m going/I can’t keep anything/But I can’t just give everything away…”

“Pink in the Night” – Mitski

“Pink in the Night” really does glow. Everything about the production and instrumentation just glimmers, bathed in reverb and synths that feel like they could dissipate with the slightest breath. Listening to it feels like watching afternoon light illuminate specks of dust until they become stars. Even the persistent kick drum that ushers the song into its ending might as well be the hammering of a lovesick heart against a ribcage. That glowing feeling is so intimately concentrated that it might as well be emanating straight from Mitski’s chest. And that’s exactly where it’s coming from—Mitski described “Pink in the Night” as being centered around “that visual of someone glowing pink because they’re so infatuated,” but that the heartbreak threaded through the first verse “doesn’t have to be a hard, horrible bad thing. It’s just like ‘I’m so infatuated and in love that I feel myself crumbling… but in a good way!'”

Of course, there’s an undercurrent in this track that the love feels one-sided or unrequited, but like too many of Mitski’s songs, they’re automatically pigeonholed as depressing. “Pink in the Night” doesn’t seem to be so, as painful as unrequited love can be. It’s just an overpowering emotion, of falling so head-over-heels in love that you feel weightless, tumbling through space with no trajectory. That infatuation is heady, but that carefree tailspin takes you all the way down, sprinting through summer rain that catches the evening light; it feels like dust turning into stars (or raindrops singing) because that’s how infatuation feels: like the ordinary has somehow become the most cosmic, wondrous thing in the universe.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

If You Still Recognize Me – Cynthia So – “I glow pink in the night in my room/I’ve been blossoming alone over you/And I hear my heart breaking tonight…”

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 – 5/31/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

BEFORE I GET INTO IT: my longtime best friend has joined me in creating a book blog! It’s over on Wix, but it’s well worth migrating to another website to see her excellent book reviews. Go show Daisy’s Fables some love!!

This week: this one really feels like I’m a 12-year-old holding up my interests and talking at you about them, but that’s what blogs are for, right?

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 5/31/26

“Huey Newton” – St. Vincent

Sit down. I’m yapping about St. Vincent’s self-titled album again. You WILL listen. You subscribed to this blog, this is the price you pay…

I really haven’t changed since the age of 12, huh? It really makes pieces of my soul wither to see companies running with the joking “your inner child needs a little treat” expressions and turning the healing experience of becoming one with your inner child corporate. No, your inner child doesn’t need the new Starbucks drink, or whatever. That being said, preordering the 10th anniversary pressing of St. Vincent’s self-titled album was for me, but also my inner 12-year-old. As I sat there listening to it, I could feel her curled up inside of me like a chrysalis. I feel like I’m slowly becoming everything she wanted me to be.

But present me reveres St. Vincent as much as 12-year-old me did. Now that I’m older, it’s become one of those puzzle boxes of albums with new layers that reveal themselves every time you listen to it. (And that’s saying something, because I listened to it a concerning amount in middle school.) For me, this listen made me realize that this album is musically and thematically sound. There isn’t as much of a narrative to it as some of St. Vincent’s other albums, but throughout the many modern anxieties that she dishes out, there’s this through line of life being swallowed by the Internet; it’s meant to be more of a near-future thing, if her cult leader persona is anything to go by, but it rang true in 2014—and today. Clark wrote “Huey Newton” as a loose stream of consciousness song; the reference to the Black Panther Huey Newton is only relevant because of a vivid dream she’d had about him after taking a high dose of Ambien. For Clark, the lyrics are “tied to the next in a way that I don’t even understand…It has the feel of an extended Google search, and is set in the near future, after a long winter.” It is kind of a sonic doomscroll in the way that it pinballs from one disconnected image to the next. But you can see the intention of the artifice of the Internet that comes through in some of these images; “Fake knife, real catcher,” or “fuckless pawn sharks” evoke the ease of which people construct their identities even though there’s nothing behind the curtain. 12 years later, her image of a lawless internet populated by fakers and criminals has become even realer, with the blight of AI polluting what was already polluted in the first place. (For the record, I’m taking the line “Cowboys of Information” as the name for my purely hypothetical St. Vincent cover band.)

“Entombed in a shrine/Of zeroes and ones” remains one of the hardest lines on the album, if only in delivery alone. “Huey Newton” switches from a more restrained, dreamy piece of indie synth-pop before launching a salvo of guitar shrapnel in your face at the 2:37 mark. Every line is spit as her signature guitars dissolve into glitch-like fuzz. It all sounds distinctly pixelated, aggressive in its assault, as though the false veil of the digital world is being torn apart by a virus before your eyes. The beauty of St. Vincent to me is that the layers on “Huey Newton” are present on every song—everything has digitized tree rings hewn into it, every one revealing something about the vibrant tapestry of this album’s dystopian, digital world.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Machinehood – S.B. Divya – “Entombed in a shrine of zeros and ones, you know/You know/Oh, with fatherless features/You motherless creatures/You know…”

“Greta” – Cate Le Bon

Cate! Le Bon! Cannot! Make! A! Bad! Album!

Genuinely baffling how one person can be this talented. Sure, there are weaker spots in her catalogue, but I don’t think there’s such a thing as a bad Cate Le Bon song. I’ve just listened to CYRK, her second album, and it’s just as inventive as some of her later work, though quite different in sound. Before she crafted atmospheres from saxophones and synths, she had a more traditionally indie rock sound, but not without the unique lyrical and vocal touches that she’s always carried. CYRK as a whole is playful (fitting for an album named for the Polish word for “circus”), an adventurous branching-out into whatever struck Le Bon’s fancy. In spirit, it reminds me a lot of Björk’s early work, where she was just putting out feelers wherever she wanted, with only the intention to make daring music.

“Playful” doesn’t exactly describe “Greta” though. It’s one of the slower, more contemplative songs on the album; aside from the vaguely trumpet detour at the end, most of it relies on muted guitar and bass. For that reason, it came out of nowhere for me. What also came out of nowhere was how emotionally moving this track is; Le Bon softly sings of a subject with “eyes the size of lagoons/Dreaming wild” and whose baby days are “coiled up inside her like ribbons all tied.” It feels like she took a telescope and looked down at me as a child, my eyes turned skyward. There’s something about it that feels like a comforting lullaby, from the references to a child born in the stars to the slow rhythm, fit for gently rocking a cradle back and forth. It feels like an ode to every weird child who refused to let the weirdness get beaten out of them, no matter how hard the world tried. If I’d heard this as a kid, I feel like I would’ve found infinite solace in it, but now that I’m hearing it as an adult, it feels like a potent reminder to keep the child alive, to not let the ribbons of baby days get tangled or forgotten, and to remember that all of us are made of star stuff.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Beautyland – Marie-Helene Bertino – “Observatories clocked you in the stars/They were holding you so dear/Greta, be good to yourself/You’ve always been here.”

“I Might” – Wilco

The Whole Love does not get the love it deserves. Fully acknowledging that I have a fog of nostalgia surrounding my head whenever I talk about this album, this album is severely underrated. I think the problem with Wilco’s discography is that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is such an obvious, career-defining best that it overshadows so much of the adventurous work that they’ve made in the decades since. And if we’re talking about adventurous, then we need to talk about The Whole Love, an unexpected buffet of Wilco’s classic alt-rock sound and explorations out into both the electronic and folk worlds. “Art of Almost” and “Sunloathe” really shouldn’t be on the same album in theory, but The Whole Love makes it happen.

This album was the first Wilco release I remember being…well, conscious for. I was in elementary school when it came out; I specifically remember my dad playing the album all the way through while driving to work and watching the Popeye crossover music video for “Dawned On Me” at the old studio where I took piano lessons. So even before I went through the whole album on my own, I’d already listened to the whole thing. “I Might” was one of the many songs on the album that remained in a nameless limbo in my memory as A Wilco Song That Certainly Exists, but I couldn’t put it to a concrete song. It sounds like your average Wilco song from the 2010’s, with its driving rock sound and cheery organs, but even though it’s not as full-throttle weird as “Art of Almost” (which comes right before it on the album…talk about whiiiiplaaaaash), it has the spirit of “let’s try everything, what’s the worst that could happen?” Jeff Tweedy’s lyrics are nonsensical and free-association (“Your sno-cone/And it’s piss and blood,” anyone?) and the chorus of “You won’t set the kids on fire/Oh, but I might” is…wild, obviously, but the more I listen to it, the more it feels like it’s a defiant statement of turning his past work—and people’s expectations of the band—upside down and destroying them. The Whole Love came out of its ashes, and to me, it’s still one of the most daring albums in their catalogue.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Obake Code – Makana Yamamoto – “It’s in the cards, oh oh/’Get Well Soon – everybody’/Do all lies have a taste?/Let it go, I don’t know, oh…”

“Advice & Vices” – Chelsea Wolfe

I’d forgotten about “Advice & Vices” since…at least high school, around the time I had my Chelsea Wolfe awakening proper and listened to The Grime and the Glow, her first album. Hearing a song like this brings up so many contradictions—I love it, but I simultaneously feel like it’s slightly distant from the music she’d become known for, and yet it feels so innately Chelsea Wolfe. It’s always been goth, but it’s not cloaked in quite the same foreboding atmosphere as much of her later work. The album is much more lo-fi, and yet you can already see the seeds of her signature style germinating; “Advice & Vices” feels like a more understated indie rock song, until you hear Wolfe’s muted ghostlike howls recorded at the very end of the song. Her voice is already strong here, and it’d only get stronger. But it’s like watching Wolfe fish in a frozen lake for what would become her sound; the ice is melting, and around it is what would become the iconic artist that I love today. She was always that good.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The King Must Die – Kemi Ashing-Giwa – “I never listen to my own best advice, no/Like one thing leads to another/Like one heart bleeds for another/And everybody wants what they can’t have…”

“New Muscles” – mary in the junkyard

The cynical part of me is starting to think that mary in the junkyard (or their management) might’ve just been too good at picking singles. But the more optimistic part of me is starting to think that Role Model Hermit is going to be such a fun album. We’re at three singles now ahead of the album’s July release, and each one has been so different from the other—this is pretty much worlds apart from “Candelabra.” It’s also a very different song than I’ve expected from mary in the junkyard, and…I love it.

“New Muscles” is such an uplifting, confidence-boosting song. But from the more gloomy instrumentation, full of strings and percussion that sounds like somebody’s whacking a plastic bucket with a spoon, you wouldn’t think it. Yet it’s the perfect song for dusting yourself off and getting back on your feet. It’s all about emerging from a cocoon and embracing all of the possibilities of your new, stronger, and more healed self: “I’ve been getting up and getting out/Working out and working on myself/New muscles all over my back/New muscles all over my back.” It feels like the spiritual successor to Wilco’s “Kicking Television” in terms of empowering indie rock songs about self-improvement that totally avoid sounding corny. It has a playful element to it (“I will take you down with one finger”), but it balances the joking “they’ll never see the new me coming” attitude with a genuine, sparkling hope for the wonderful things that’ll happen once you start exercising these new muscles and putting that healing self to work. “New Muscles” came out at a very advantageous time in my life—I’ve been feeling some version of this song for a while, what with trying to claw my way out of a multitude of bad habits and becoming more independent in my life. It really does feel like emerging from a chrysalis, even though I know that I’ll probably be emerging from a number of chrysalises over the course of my life. For now, I’m taking this new self to better places. Here’s to flexing your new muscles.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Juliet Takes a Breath – Gabby Rivera – “Courage in my bones/I embrace the thunder and the lightning/I will make it so hard to forget 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: 5/24/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: inventive covers, timeless anthems, and some classic quirked-up white boy music.

Enjoy this week’s review!

SUNDAY SONGS: 5/24/26

“A Mistake” – Fiona Apple

If we live long enough under the patriarchy, most of us women have the urge to permanently destroy something at least once in their lives. Once is generous, honestly…have you read the news lately? For Fiona Apple, who had been heavily scrutinized under the public eye and lambasted by music critics in the years leading up to When the Pawn…, the urge must’ve been constant. That’s why “A Mistake” feels so genuine. It’s a slinky, trip-hoppy track about breaking free of society’s expectation of a “good girl” and deliberately wrecking things, fully cognizant of the consequences but not caring in the slightest: “And when the day is done and I look back/And the fact is I had fun/Fumbling around/All the advice I shunned, and I ran/Where they told me not to run/But I sure had fun.” No matter if you act on it, Apple taps into that universal urge to raise hell after being boxed in and stymied by expectations of femininity (“I wanna make a mistake/Why can’t I make a mistake?”), societal control, and an urge to just rebel, even if you don’t know what against. And then there’s the element of deliberately going against good advice—Apple’s trail of destruction, by her own admission, isn’t entirely justified, but there’s that constant, biting urge to defy well-meaning advice anyway. After all, “And if you wanna make sense/Whatcha lookin’ at me for?/I’m no good at math.” It’s all wrapped up in a complex package, not always thoughtful, but from a messy, nonsensical place of rage with nowhere to go. Screeching guitars that give the effect of buzzing insects and a luscious synth loop to back it all up, creating a fully-fledged ode to giving into your most reckless urges.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Gideon the Ninth – Tamsyn Muir – “So I’m gonna fuck it up again/I’m gonna do another detour/Unpave my path/And if you wanna make sense/Whatcha lookin’ at me for?/I’m no good at math…”

“Crosseyed and Painless” – Talking Heads

This might be the moment where I finally, finally get into Talking Heads. My brother recently listened to Remain In Light and introduced me to a handful of songs from it; apparently, he’d also fully Mandela-effected the idea that I owned a Remain In Light t-shirt, so maybe I should just listen to it. So much has been said about the album: the fusion of rock, funk, and early hip-hop, the influence of Afrobeats, the early electronic instrumentals. And all of that’s there. But you know what strikes me immediately?

Brian Eno. This just reeks of Eno. I mean, he obviously produced this album, but his rhythmic influence is so clear. “No One Receiving,” one of my favorite songs of his, is very Talking Heads, and he’d worked with the band on several albums at that point. But the frantic, anxious rhythms of “Crosseyed and Painless” and the chirping electronics are so Brian Eno. (He also provides backing vocals on the chorus, and Byrne’s certainly got some “King’s Lead Hat” in the delivery.) Maybe I just love it because of the Eno by proxy. But I feel like that would be a disservice to David Byrne and co., whose unique touch seems to have made Remain In Light so iconic. First off—oh my God, Tina Weymouth’s bass playing is nothing short of phenomenal. Once she finds the groove, she grabs ahold and never lets go. I think Byrne is what separates this from Eno in the end—though they share the same kind of angular energy, Byrne’s seamless shifts between desperate crooning in the chorus to frantic, anxious proto-rapping in the bridge: “Facts all come with points of view/Facts don’t do what I want them to/Facts just twist the truth around/Facts are living with their insides out.” That’s just nothing but David Byrne, as is this song’s spirit, in the end. Eno bolstered it, but the sweaty-palmed sprint through a state of alienation is nothing but Talking Heads.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Volatile Memory – Seth Haddon – “Nothing there/No information left of any kind/Lifting my head/Looking for the danger signs…”

“Modern Girl” – Sleater-Kinney

I hate to say it, but the strongest memory I have of hearing “Modern Girl” was hearing Sleater-Kinney play it live while co-headlining with Wilco about five years back. They did the classic “this is our big song, sing it with us!” thing and tried to get the crowd to sing the chorus…and only a handful of people did. Yeesh. Probably some of the largest-scale secondhand embarrassment I’ve ever felt. But they’re plenty successful, well-known, and presumably happy with their lives, so I can’t imagine that one (1) crowd in Colorado not singing along with them made much of a dent on their egos.

Nonetheless, “Modern Girl” is one of the songs I took away from that setlist all the way back in 2021. Despite the painful mix on the version I have (once it gets loud, it gets crunchier than a bass-boosted meme from 2018…somebody remaster this already, Jesus 😭), it has the same staying power. It’s an anthemic, gradually building story of mounting emptiness; every verse, happily sung until bitterly screamed, scrambles for meaning in a world of artifice. There’s a void (a donut hole, if you will) at the heart of “Modern Girl” that fruitlessly gets filled by consumerism, mass media, and hollow love. It’s a sort of universal story of filling the hole in your life with all the plastic that TV advertises, only to find that “My whole life/Looks like a picture of a sunny day”—beautiful on the surface, but really just a flimsy piece of film in the end. Where you end up is sprawled out, floundering in the drowning tide of distortion that gradually swallows Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker’s riffs and harmonicas. Sometimes, all you can do when faced with the emptiness at the heart of your life is shout at it—and shout Sleater-Kinney does.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

On Earth As It Is on Television – Emily Jane – “My baby loves me/I’m so angry/Anger makes me a modern girl/Took my money/I couldn’t buy nothin’/I’m sick of this brave new world…”

“Company In My Back” (Wilco cover) – Cate Le Bon

Somehow, while spreading the gospel of Cate Le Bon to my family, I completely missed this cover, which my brother thankfully found. Wilco Covered, a limited-edition album only available on CD (and another big thank you to my dad for digging it up on eBay), was a real mixed bag, but this cover is a staggeringly good fit for both Le Bon and Wilco. “Company In My Back” comes from A Ghost Is Born, and Jeff Tweedy’s signature lyricism was already at some of its delightfully weirdest; “I attack with love/Pure bug beauty/Curl my lips and crawl up to you” is still one of the more memorable Wilco openings if we’re going by lyrics alone. Add in the wording of the chorus (“Holy shit/There’s a company in my back”) and some dulcimer, and you’ve got one of the more left field early Wilco songs out there. The original’s clattering percussion, like bug’s legs against tile, are equally so. It’s natural that Le Bon covered it, given her weirdo proclivities. Her moody lilt and agitated instrumentals fit in so naturally in her interpretation of this song. (I especially love the way she sings “They are hissing radiator tunes.” Pure magic.) This was recorded in 2019, and Reward has its footprints all over it, with blasts of saxophone to replace the acoustic guitars of the guitar. It’s such an excellent tribute, turning “Company In My Back” almost inside out while lovingly preserving the offbeat-ness of the original without sacrificing her own artistry.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Half-Built Garden – Ruthanna Emrys – “You learn so slow, old radiant beauty/I’ll curve my flight…”

“I Wanna Be Adored” (Stone Roses cover) – King Woman

What makes a cover good to me is when it captures the song’s spirit; like I just talked about with Cate Le Bon’s take on “Company In My Back,” it messes around with the instrumentals but retains Jeff Tweedy’s soul beneath it. Though King Woman’s take on “I Wanna Be Adored” doesn’t reach those heights (and how could it, with the original basically defining a good portion of the alternative/indie rock sound of the ’90s?), I think it succeeds in the same way. While the Stone Roses’ original dips into a dreamy haze, King Woman’s cover basically sounds like Stone Roses by way of Chelsea Wolfe. It’s longer and more drawn-out, with sludgy guitars and a thick, foggy echo clouding everything. Kristina Esfandiari shouts the iconic chorus as though into the mouth of a canyon, pleading into a cold void, a stark contrast to the speed at which it’s sung in the original. It’s an exciting take on this song—one that clearly melds King Woman’s style into the original’s beating heart.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Redsight – Meredith Mooring – the sludgy, doomy atmosphere of this cover absolutely fits with this tale of dark magic in space.

BONUS: In addition to Programmes for Cools, Jim Noir has just released The DLC Tapes exclusively on Patreon—or you can buy it on his KoFi! It’s another album of polished releases from previous EPs and outtakes. Here’s the reworking of “Scene 2”:

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 (5/5/26) – Saltcrop

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

GUESS WHO’S BACK…WITH A BACHELOR’S DEGREE! 🎓 YIPPEE!! Either way, I’ll be back to my normal posting schedule for the foreseeable future, as I’m now done with finals and all of my graduation festivities.

I’ve been a fan of Yume Kitasei since her debut, The Deep Sky. Her second novel, The Stardust Grail, was a 5-star read for me—it’s truly a gem, if you haven’t read it already. (After re-reading it last month, I’m firmly convinced that we need another book set in that universe. Her worldbuilding was so expansive!! It needs a companion novel!! Please!!) So I was ecstatic to hear that she was writing another sci-fi novel. It seems she’s been jumping between all kinds of sci-fi subgenres: a literary thriller with The Deep Sky, space opera with The Stardust Grail, and now dystopia with Saltcrop. And though it didn’t blow me away like The Stardust Grail did, Saltcrop is still a worthy, timely testament to Kitasei’s talents.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Saltcrop – Yume Kitasei

In a world ravaged by climate change, the three Shimizu sisters–Nora, Carmen, and Skipper—eke out a living with their aging grandmother. But Nora has been missing for months without an explanation. Carmen has faith that Nora will turn up soon, but Skipper suspects foul play. The sisters voyage out into uncertain waters to find Nora, but when they stumble into an intricate conspiracy that’s more than they bargained for, they must decide whether the journey was worth it at all—and if Nora is even out there in the first place.

TW/CW: medical content, body horror, death of parents, abuse, violence, murder, illness, animal death, chronic illness themes

One of the coolest things about watching Yume Kitasei’s career expand, from a reader’s perspective, is her willingness to try almost anything within the sci-fi genre. Her first novel was a more literary, sci-fi thriller; her second, a daring space opera with influences from Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Saltcrop is wholly different than both of them, and perhaps the greatest thing about it is that Kitasei never seems to run out of ideas, and that she’s unafraid to chase them.

Saltcrop is full of heart, and to me, that was its main strength. What formed this heart was the central relationship between Skipper, Carmen, and Nora. Even though 1/3 sisters was notably missing for 2/3rds of the novel, her presence was palpable; all that was possible due to the subtle interactions that Kitasei wove through Skipper and Carmen, both past and present. Their clashing but united dynamic as sisters propelled the novel in such a poignant way. Though you know from the start that Skipper and Carmen would cross the ocean for their sister (and they do), Kitasei never falters in giving you the sense of the complex but steadfast love that they have for each other. It feels like a middle finger to all of the dystopian media that posits that the apocalypse will somehow deteriorate our inherently human urge to love and help each other. Siblings will be siblings, even when climate change floods the world—Kitasei means that in every sense possible.

The setting of Saltcrop is familiar: a flooded dystopian world rendered unrecognizable by climate change, where the poor eke out a hardened existence while the rich continue to get richer. It’s a plot we’ve heard many times before, but Kitasei’s touch made it much more human. Aside from the exploration of the sisters’s relationships, I think what made Saltcrop’s plot and worldbuilding so memorable were the vignettes that made it human. Kitasei’s flooded world was peppered with stories of ordinary people, dead and alive, who made a living in spite of nearly inhospitable circumstances. It doesn’t shy away from the dark and ugly parts of this world (namely the spread of illness and corporate greed) Combine that with the clearly exhaustive research she did about agriculture, epidemiology, and genetic modification that got especially relevant in the last half of the novel, and Saltcrop was one of the most lived-in dystopias that I’ve read in quite some time.

I said earlier that Saltcrop is fairly different from her previous two novels, but in terms of writing, I think it trends closer to The Deep Sky, which is to say that it leans more into the literary side of her prose. And if there’s anybody I trust with more literary prose, it’s Kitasei. Her eye for poignant, needle-sharp descriptions that lodge themselves into your heart is stronger than ever—there are casual gut-punches laid about everywhere. Even in the heart of a climate-ravaged dystopia, there were almost Fargo-like interludes where reality and memory warp, which was all the more potent considering the themes of remembrance in Saltcrop. (The bear scene in the middle especially comes to mind.) Like the plot, Kitasei’s prose turned an environment that we’ve seen many times before into something wholly fresh and enlivened.

I’ll admit, I have some mixed feelings about the ending. On the one hand, I loved how the sisters rallied together to try and bring down the antagonist corporation, which routinely swallowed all of their attempts at resisting; the gradual, quiet victory was hopeful, and felt realistic to the long and rocky road to justice that we see with these kinds of issues. However, I feel like there were so many unanswered questions at the end; without spoiling anything, it felt like the setup to another novel, but there was so much left unsolved and unsaid, and yet Kitasei gave it the tone of a bittersweet ending, but a concrete ending all the same. It only felt wrapped up in the sense of the corporation plot, but beyond that, it felt unfinished. I’m all for an ambiguous ending, but with such a key piece of the puzzle missing, it didn’t feel satisfying in the slightest.

All in all, a startlingly human post-apocalyptic story of sisterhood and survival. 4 stars!

Saltcrop is a standalone, but Yume Kitasei is also the author of The Deep Sky and The Stardust Grail.

Today’s song:

genuinely criminal that this isn’t available on streaming, but this is, hands down, one of the best Wilco covers out there

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: 12/28/25

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!