Tag: cool

78 Lil Yachty: Nuthin’ 2 Prove

~ Lex Leeson ~ 7 Comments

 

Longtime readers of this blog (hi, Mum!*) will know I have a bit of an obsession with Lil Yachty. I honestly think he’s a fascinating figure who has the sufficient lack of self-awareness and disregard for the supposed former statesman and accepted tropes of his genre that he could potentially create something very special. His sound is obnoxious, flagrantly disrespectful and nonchalantly artless. But then, I’m a depressingly old white idiot: the sound of 2018 should sound borderline offensive to me! Lil Yachty is 21 years old, he’s already released one stone cold classic song (fight me) and a patchy and imperfect debut album that nonetheless showed flashes of the buoyant/obnoxious/genius/overjoyed style that is all his own and that could see him take over the world before too long, to the fabulous irritation of old farts everywhere. Whether you like it or not, this was evolution and it was frickin’ exciting!

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(*My Mum has far too much self-respect to read my blog. Only people with a base level of pitiful self-respect would ever waste time reading this shit. Yeah, I’m talking about you. Aunty Cheryl, however, loves it! She is, however, a shameless crack cocaine addict and, if I’m being completely honest, has been dead for 12 years next April)

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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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Donald Trump Breaks the Fourth Wall

~ Lex Leeson ~ Leave a comment

There are only two real reasons that exist to justify writing, two possible excuses for dribbling over your fingers and then wiping the resulting saliva- diluted with Monster Munch crumbs from last night’s binge of consumption that attempted to comfort the desolate loneliness that eats at your soul and also from the tears that such an act inevitably result in- across a keyboard and mashing the porridge of shame into roman numerals and expecting the outside world to be deserving of it.

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The first reason is if you’re actually, like, good at writing. If you’re a proper good writer like, I dunno,  Dan Brown or David Walliams then your writing might be good enough to one day be turned into a movie, and therefore your ideas could actually effect the wider cultural conscious. I’ll admit that here’s a weird grey area that exists where you write good stuff that isn’t turned into a film- like… erm… Salmon Rushdie?- and this just about qualifies your existence. But who reads books today, honestly? Freaking nerds, that’s who.

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I obviously don’t fall into this category: I’m not very good at writing.

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2 Bon Iver: 22, A Million

~ Lex Leeson ~ 7 Comments

Let’s get the important stuff out of the way first: I’ve always pronounced it ‘Bon Ivor’

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Because of this I set up a Google Alert to tell me when somebody finally made a ‘Bon Iver the Engine’ meme, as I truly believed that such a witty reference to both an ultra hipster musical act and an old children’s’ show would truly bring the world together in these troubled times

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No, but apparently he’s one of those ultra-hipster tossers who chooses to pretentiously pronounce his name the way it’s spelled, so the reference is lost

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3 Let’s Eat Grandma: I, Gemini

~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

‘I, Gemini’ is a perfect encapsulation of why it is I love music

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Let’s Eat Grandma (great name +1) are two Norwich girls who…

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I think I’m allowed to refer to them as such, they were only 16 and 17 years old when they released this album

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No, honestly, and if they were in their 40s, or 30s, or even 20s they simply wouldn’t have been able to make an album as supernaturally beautiful as this

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21 Christine and the Queens: Christine and the Queens

~ Lex Leeson ~ 4 Comments

Can you believe this is only the second (halfway decent) self titled album released (cough) this year??

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I had, like, a thing for self-titled albums, didn’t I?

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I think it was called Self-Titled Vindication or summat, but it’s been so long now that I can’t quite remember

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Did I use a picture or something?

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35 Ital Tek: Hollowed

~ Lex Leeson ~ 3 Comments

It has been said that Ital Tek is ‘the sound of Brexit’, which I’m not sure I agree with, but it offers me a good opportunity to waffle on about it

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For some reason, I thought that Ital Tek was European- perhaps it was the funny sounding name, and the desolate yet achingly beautiful soundscapes that always sound a little Scandinavian to me- so I was planning to introduce this wonderful album as the sound of the EU. The bastard’s actually from Brighton, so I had to make a late change

 

If your immediate response to Brexit is that it was simply racist, then you yourself are part of the reason for it

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36 Kanye West: The Life of Pablo

~ Lex Leeson ~ 10 Comments

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The wild tackle in the 1991 FA Cup Final- that Paul Gascoigne injured himself so comprehensively attempting that he was never the same player again- was a painful example of the kind of aggressive and impulsive thought process that actually played its part in making Gazza the amazing player he was. If you took such spontaneous and emotionally intuitiveness our of Gascoigne’s game, he wouldn’t be the same player. The tackle itself though, was an act of stupidity and should not really be celebrated

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Charles Darwin was a hideous misogynist, who viewed women as simply womb vessels who were little more than irritating intellectual inferiors who interfered with serious scientific research by talking about ponies and periods and shit. He ended up marrying his cousin, probably because he felt marriage was sufficiently socially expected and didn’t want to leave the house to find a wife. However, if you took this sociopathic view of life only through its logical and consequential results, then he may have never invented dinosaurs and proved God wasn’t real, or whatever. However, his sexism should still not be celebrated in and of itself

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austin

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