That’s Quite Enough of What We Need of THAT…

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I’ve just been thinking (see above): remember those Paris attacks back in November 2015? They were horrid, weren’t they? I think we can all agree that The Eagles of Death Metal are at best a ‘serviceable’ act, but I don’t think there’s a form of entertainment on Earth that 89 people should be slaughtered just for attending (apart from, of course, [INSERT YOUR OWN JOKE HERE, THEN HAVE SOME FUCKING RESPECT]). 130 people were murdered* in total, which I think we can all agree is far too many.

In the UK (and maybe around the World, who gives a shit?) many people were moved to claim how they ‘Stood With Paris’, or ‘Je Suis Paris’ which means

‘I am Paris’. Which, while factually incorrect,

was a nice little gesture of kinship with fellow human beings against brainless acts of nihilistic selfishness.

Some (most, it seemed at one point) people even did that thing where they layered the French flag over their Facebook or Twitter profile, to show that they were in so much empathy with the French that they were actually physically turning into a freakin’ French flag. Not overdoing it at all, you had to show all your friends how overwhelming sympathetic you were. I’m sure all these people gave every last penny they had to charities and efforts to comfort the victims. I even saw a woman on Bumble** who still had the French flag on her picture. ‘Jesus’ I thought ‘Don’t think that’s a bit dated at all??’. Then I wrote this article.

I still swiped right though, because she had an absolutely cracking set of norks.

But, yeah, slacktivism it may have mostly been (and ooooooooh boy, will I get to fucking ‘slacktivism’ one day soon!), but people are showing solidarity with a country that’s just been through a rather devastating mass murder, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that…

The thing is though, the day before the Paris attacks there was a similarly motivated and similarly horrendous suicide murder in Beruit, where 49 people were killed. Two weeks before arseholes claiming allegiance to similar after school groups bombed a plane killing 219 Russians, four Ukrainians, and one Belarusian. The month before a bomb killed one hundred and three civilians in Ankara.

Nobody really cared about any of those though, did they? There was not a single Facebook friend who layed the Lebanese flag over his fat, ugly profile picture, not a single ‘я россия’ post. And nobody ever, ever gave one tiny little fairy shite about what happened in Turkey. Like, what ever happened in Turkey. What’s happening in Turkey right now. What’s ever going to happen in Turkey.

It made me feel horribly, horribly awkward. The reason people in the UK didn’t really care about these other attacks (I mean, go nuts if you want more examples) is because they were happening to… foreign people…

I mean, I know the French are technically foreign people, but they’re not as ‘foreign’ as these really foreign people, are they? Do you know what I mean? Do you? Do you, really? Do you know what I mean? Do you?

Besides, Lebanon, Turkey, that plane crash was in Egypt: all these countries… y’know… they’re those type of countries, aren’t they? So, you can hardly call it unexpected, can you…?

Please, just… just don’t pick and choose which countries are deserving of your sympathies and which countries not even worth acknowledgement, especially when it means you only mourn the dead in majority white Christian countries. Listen, it’s unintentional, I know, you’re all perfectly OK people, but it implicitly draws lines regarding what types of human life are worth mourning.

In November (kayfabe) this year 128 people were murdered while praying at a Mosque in Egypt. If you think that any part of that sentence means those lives are less worthy of your sympathy than the Paris victims, or if you somehow bizarrely regard going to a Mosque as less worthwhile than attending a fucking Eagles of Death Metal gig, then I’ll just tell you now that you’re not going to enjoy reading this blog.

Do you know who I think would enjoy reading this though? The band PVRIS

PVRIS, of course, are actually from Massachusetts and have little to do with the city of Paris. The inspiration of their name came when the three members did a little genealogy research for a bit of a lark, and found that they were actually all related to Peter Purves.

To be honest, they chances that any of you reading this are related to Peter Purves are extremely high: the guy, in his own words, ‘stuck it in any hole going’ during the height of his cocaine fuelled celebrity in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s. I would actually recommend you and your husband/wife take a genetics test immediately, as you’re both likely descendants of Peter Purves. After all, let’s face it, both of your Mums are right slags to this day, aren’t they? It also means that little fling you had with Peter Purves in 1997 might be an anecdote you wanna stop telling at parties.

‘All We Know of Heaven, All We Need of Hell’ (best album title of 2017 +50) is a title that sums up perfectly what PVRIS’s mission is. The ‘heaven’ that they know is pristine pop music, delicious earworms, indispensible choruses and near perfect song craft. However, they know that to make the band truly special they have to sprinkle a dangerously toxic amount of evil: ‘all they need of hell’.

That ‘hell’ is, essentially, Linkin Park. Maybe a bit of Evanescence. While listening to ‘AWKOHAWKOH’ (ooga-chakka-ooga-chakka) you’ll freuently pick up on an influence, a citation, or even a homage to something that is definitely not cool. PVRIS were obviously Nu-Metal fans growing up, and have somehow managed to make that somehow OK’

Few albums released (kayfabe) this year are quite as captivating as PVRIS’s second LP: it’s not cool, it’s certainly not subtle, I’m not entirely sure it’s clever, but it’s certainly big. And absolutely essential

Score

Age of Singer Lynn Gunn: 24 (-10)

Album Number: 2 (+6)

Album Length: 42 minutes (+4)

Very Good Songs: 0

Brilliant Songs: 10 (+50)

#Consistency

AMAZING Songs: 0

Ah, but no, but the thing is, yeah, it was PVRIS who contributed the AMAZING song to the Con X album, so they can get +10 for that here

% of Album Worthwhile: 100

And every song is at least ‘amazing’, so we get our first:

Cover:

So… Hell’s in the lake…?

+4

Previous Entries: NONE

Meta Critic: 86

Boo-ya! I knew it was OK to like this album!!

2017 Selfish Narcissism Incidents with 100+ Deaths: 9 (+90)

Total: 450

https://thisispvris.bandcamp.com/releases

*I’m not going to refer to it as ‘terrorism’, because it wasn’t. The definition of terrorism is ‘doing some super loopy shady shit in the pursuit of political aims‘. The people who carried out these acts didn’t have any wider political gains, they just wanted to commit suicide in the most notable and newsworthy way possible. Remember: my suicide is going to be so notable that it changes the entire culture– like The Beatles appearing on the Ed Sullivan- but not a single person will be hurt by it- so, not like The Beatles on Ed Sullivan. It’s widely known now that the band were so hyped up after the performance with a mixture of adrenaline and high concentrate barbiturates that they actually tore poor Ed limb from limb and ate his brains in some bizarre scouse black magic ritual. This sort of practice was actually very common in Liverpool way into the mid-80s. Before, predictably, bloody Thatcher put a stop to it.

**Bumble was introduced to me by a friend who read my Tinder terrors way back in my Björk piece. Been on it for a few weeks now, and nobody’s interested. I’m beginning to worry that I’m actually really ugly