Tag: big show

#3 Let’s Eat Grandma: Two Ribbons

~ Lex Leeson ~ 3 Comments

We’re never really taught about friendships. I’m not arguing that we get bad information, or problematic role models, just that we get none at all. Your parents show you what to expect from relationships, what sexual love looks like, and what your expectations should be. Yeah, almost entirely wrongly, and that will likely ruin your whole life, but at least an archetype exists. They fuck you up, your mum and Dad, but at least that’s something.

Who shows you what friendship should look like? Your siblings?? Either you have such a difficult relationship with your siblings twisted by hierarchies subconsciously solidified within your family’s dynamic that friendship should be an escape from those relationship, or your connection with your siblings is so strong that no unrelated person could ever compare with the history you share, and no friendship can clear the prerequisites. I love my siblings (but also: fuck them, right?), you love your siblings (but also: fuck them, right?), you might wish you had siblings (but also: fuck that, right?), but that is not friendship.

JUMP IN ANY TIME, THESE ARE GOOD TOPICS

#8 Jeshi: Universal Credit

~ Lex Leeson ~ 1 Comment

When I become in charge of the UK – I am more than happy to kill the 50.48million people ahead of me* in the line of succession to become king and then declare an absolute monarchy – I like to think I will be a fair and benevolent ruler to the 15 million or so remaining residents that I didn’t need to slaughter in order to become leader. The death penalty though? Yeah, bring that shit in straight away. Only for the most heinous crimes (parking on bike lanes for example), but chiefly for what my reign will consider the Original Sin: complaints about how ‘easy’ people on benefits have it. Yeah, any version of that and it’s Who Wants to be Beheaded?! live on ITV presented by Declan Donnelly (I can’t explain it, but I feel that Ant McPartlin will have been executed pretty early on).

(*yeah, worked it out. I accept that I’m pretty low down on the list, but I am white, so the Royal Family will still automatically choose me ahead of a certain section of the population. So there’s that.)

PAIN IN MY MIND, BRAIN, BACK, LOWER SPINE

#43 Jenny Hval: Classic Objects

~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

My mother came to the city at 21
And had no choice but to drive to work
She said, “I cried in the car every day until I didn’t”
And when she had me, the midwife
Looked her in the eye and said, “Poor baby, you’re so scared”
I guess I was born anyway

American Coffee

I dunno, dudes, I’ve got a weird relationship with Jenny Hval.

Ooooooh, the bass in that song though

Nooooooooo, not that kind of weird relationship! I have always prided myself on how well I respect both my own and Jenny Hval’s boundaries. She has never spotted me as an 18 year old at a charity basketball game that she arranged and then soon after sent me photos of her genitals. And I, for my part, have never sent her cardboard boxes filled with a own hair and toenail clippings, with a single bullet placed in the middle. That would be weird, right?? Like, why on Earth would I do that?? If Rico Nasty’s legal team are reading this, I just want to clarify how that definitely isn’t something I would ever do, so you’ve obviously got the wrong guy. You’ve not mentioned it in court yet for some reason, but I happen to know that Rico was also sent a Jiffy bag containing three amputated toes, and that definitely wasn’t me either. I don’t even know about that! So, yeah, no idea where the hair and bullet came from, and I wouldn’t bother even bringing up the three toes, as I’m not even aware of that so it’s a dead end. Also, legally, I’m pretty sure you can’t force me to remove my shoes and socks in court, so you may as well give it up now. We may never know, I guess? Maybe start a True Crime podcast?

BESSIE DID YOU MAKE IT

Money in the Ranked part 3 (5-1)

~ Lex Leeson ~ 1 Comment

OK, we’re definitely finishing this fucker…

Part 1

Part 2

5: Wrestlemania 24

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How many words have I vomited onto my fingers then indelicately smeared across my keyboard in respect of Money in the Bank matches? Ten thousand? Fifteen? A million?? Probably closer to the latter*. A lot, I think we can agree.

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(*Or should I say, probably closer to the LADDER?!?! Yeah. A good, solid pun. My worry is the word ‘latter’ is probably not in wide enough usage for the fucking killer joke to really hit home. I know, it’s not fair, my burgeoning comic career is being badly hampered by my audience’s lack of vocabulary. Again. It’s like when my 12 night stand at the Comedy Club received scathing reviews (“If AIDs had sex with cancer, and frequently drank moonshine during the pregnancy, the severely mentally disabled child would be Alex Palmer’s stand-up set” – Time Out) because nobody understood my hilarious observation of how the word ‘Brexit’ kind of rhymed with the third person singular active indicative of the Latin word for ‘understand’. Screw you, plebs, my 45 minutes on the topic are killer and I ain’t dumbing it down.)

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44 JPEGMAFIA: Veteran

~ Lex Leeson ~ 5 Comments

Hmmm, this album presents a bit of a problem for me in respect to me writing any sort of a coherent piece on it. I mean, sure, I haven’t really written a coherent piece yet in 386* blog posts, but this one is, like, far less likely to be coherent than most, yeah?

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(…)

(*actual number, fact fans! Maybe the thousandth post is the one where I live stream my suicide? Considering it’s taken me three years to reach 384, it should take me, what, about six more to reach 1000? I’ll be in my forties by that point, and as a result almost definitely praying for death. Only if I get enough readers though. Make sure you all hit subscribe)

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Necessary Evil 2018

~ Lex Leeson ~ Leave a comment

An Unwanted Return That Nobody Really Wants and Everyone is a Bit Embarrassed At

‘Necessary Evil is for better or for worse the imaginative record of man’s sexual will’

-Peter Michelson

‘On Necessary Evil, every platitude leads to an obscurantist pretension and back again’

J Lloyd Samuel

Necessary Evil 2016 was posted in October 2017, Necessary Evil 2017 got a little closer by starting in February 2018 and now- look!- Necessary Evil 2018 actually comes out in two thousand and fricking eighteen!!

Yes, the countdown finally gets back to starting on December 1st in a vain attempt to capture the relevance it once had way back in 2015 (remember my review of Drenge’s ‘Undertow’? Special times, we’ll never have that type of magic again). And- fuck me!- the main consideration this year in to finish the thing before I go to bed early on New Year’s Eve, cryong over the fact I have no friends. So this year’s list won’t have as many 6000 word philosophical ruminations on the human condition as loyal readers of this blog might have come accustomed to. Also, in the name of brevity I have tried my hardest to condense 2018 into the 15 essential records that deserve whatever little attention this blog affords.

At least, that was the idea, and I honestly tried to exclude as many records as I could. As always, though, it turns out that there are just so many records out there! Loads of legitimately brilliant records that I want to shine light on; loads of perhaps less accomplished records by more obscure artists I believe deserve the attention; loads of records that might not be ‘good’ in the scientific sense but, to quote Jonathan Swift, light a spark in my whoopsie; loads of records that might not be ‘good’ in the scientific sense nor ‘good’ in any sense whatsoever but I want to tall about anyway because I love the sound of my own keyboard taps; and of course, as always, there are records that are the sound of Brexit.

I managed to scale it down to 82. Kill me.

It’s been another great year for music, with some NE mainstays delivering their greatest album yet out of nowhere, some old favourites releasing puzzlingly unsatisfactory records, and many artists jumping immediately to My New Favourite Thing status.

I’m still not sure if there were any amazing records released in 2018. All of the best albums of the year have at least one glaring flaw, and despite their being a perhaps record number of Extremely Good albums with four stars spilling out of their anuses, I’m not sure any 2018 album will in the future be regarded as a classic. Because of this, I’ve never struggled so much over which record should be number one, and there’s a very good chance I’ll change my mind about it in the 3’185 days it takes me to write this bastard list. This is also the first list in a long time that I’ve written with no idea what the critical consensus is leaning toward, so I don’t think I’d be exaggerating were I to call Necessary Evil the purest and- dare I say it?- most woke albums of the year list on the internet.

If you’ve read NE before you’ll know what to expect- it’ll start off a bit scrappy and ill-defined, hit its peak around half way through with some legitimately brilliant posts, then descend badly into nonsense as the writer just begs for it to end. We’re gonna have a good time!

Also, because I’m really aiming to wrap this up in appropriate time, I’m afraid I won’t be filling my reviews with dumb, nonsensical wrestling references that literally nobody reading this is going to get.

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Only joking, I’m probably going to do more than ever– wait until we get to JPEGMAFIA’s album!! Oh, erm, spoiler, i guess…

OK, so No. 82 is…

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45 And So I Watch You From Afar: The Endless Shimmering

~ Lex Leeson ~ 8 Comments

Seth Manchester: So Much To Answer For

Image result for john robb

Now, if you read my rapturous praise of The Hotelier’s ‘Goodness‘ last year- which you didn’t, because you’ve only arrived at this entry by mistake (perhaps after punching ‘erotic fucking baboon*’ into Google, arriving here penis in hand and, if you’re being honest, desperately disappointed) and already can tell that the cheap and obnoxious work evident in both the cheap presentation and the nonsensical garbage written is hardly worth trawling through three months worth of posts in order to proper place this particular entry on a semi-obscure instrumental rock band from Belfast in its intended context- then you might remember- though even if you did read it, it’s far from certain that you’d remember a brief snippet of information lightly touched on during the piece, and are far more likely to be mentally scarred for life by the image of a pale fat guy dancing with his shirt off if the entry left any lasting impression on you at all- how much of the praise for the construction of such an unholy masterpiece of a record should lay at the feet of one ‘Seth Manchester’, who contributed some of the greatest rock production I could ever remember hearing.

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I’ve, erm, lost a lot of weight since those pictures, ladies…

Continue reading “45 And So I Watch You From Afar: The Endless Shimmering” →