Tag: gold star artist

#1 Fever Ray: Radical Romantics (Greatest Album of 2023)

~ Lex Leeson ~ 1 Comment

This is for our careers

Putting my kid in high school

Even it Out… sort of

All year I adored the opening lines from ‘Radical Romantics’ fifth track. I loved the angry, vicious attack of the commodified work of an artist. How the work is no longer about inspiration or true artistic integrity, but just a career. Under capitalism it has become just another desperate attempt to ensure safety, housing, food and education for your family. And what does such a system force you to do with your artistic inclinations? Or maybe the social safety nets?? “And then we cut, cut, cut, cut/Cut, cut, cut, cut/Cut, cut, cut, cut/Cut, cut, cut, cut/Cut, cut, cut, cut/Cut, cut, cut, cut/Cut, cut, cut, cut/Cut, cut, cut, cut”. Comrade Karin Dreijer! Give those capitalist pigdogs what they deserve!

There’s no room for you
And we know where you live
One day we might come after you
Taking back what’s ours

Workers of the World unite!!

SUNSET IN THE MAZE (YOU’RE ASKING ME MY SYMPTONS, DOCTOR, I DON’T WANNA FEEL)

14 Jamila Woods: Water Made Us

~ Lex Leeson ~ 1 Comment

Aaaaaaaaaah, love, isn’t it? Don’t you love love? Don’t you love love, where you finally find the one who allows you to live your life and not make any sacrifices. Love, where you don’t need to make any effort at all, just vibe? Love that allows you just be yourself, right? Love, where you and your soulmate just sit in each other’s company and feel? Love, the kind you clean up with a mop and bucket, like the lost catacombs of Egypt, only God knows where we stuck it?

Or maybe your love is the passionate sort?? Maybe your love is defined by long periods of anger and trauma interspersed jarringly with incredibly lascivious and incredibly loud sex? Your love is broken cutlery and broken backs? Your love is screaming in anger but occasionally screaming in pleasure? You have one of those steamy relationships like they do in the movies, right? Your relationship is sometimes that argument scene in ‘Marriage Story‘, sometimes they’re outside the house doing a ‘STEEEEEEEEELLAAAAAAAAAAAA‘, but sometimes it’s the opening scene in ‘Betty Blue’, you know warram saying?? Seriously, the only place I can find that clip is on porn sites! Hot! Spicy! Nobody else understands! They only hurt you because they love you, right?

BACK TO MY WAYS LIKE 2019

21 Lykke Li: Wounded Rhymes

~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

Don’t pull your pants, before I go down
Don’t turn away, this is my time
Don’t make demands, I don’t take none
Just say a prayer that it gon’ get done
Don’t pull your pants before I go down
Don’t turn away, this is my time
Like a shotgun needs an outcome
I’m your prostitute, you gon’ get some
Like a shotgun needs an outcome
I’m your prostitute, you gon’ get some

Get Some

Hooooooooooooooooooooo mama! That’s some spicy meatballs! Is it hot in here? I know it’s not my central heating, as I haven’t been able to afford that for around two years now.

I still remember my reaction on first hearing the introductory single from Lykke Li’s second album. I had fallen in love with their debut record (#3 in 2008) and had a extremely memorable personal experience/sexual awakening while seeing her live that year. “Sexual awakening”? I dunno, but I vividly remember watching her interpret her agonisingly beautiful and perversely anthemic music through hip movements and overwhelming stage presence and thinking to myself “I would die for this person”. That thought came from deep in my soul. And also my penis. Not entirely my penis, you understand, I’m not a monster. But my penis was still on the board of directors of my soul. It was at least allowed to have a say.

#Representation

TO THE BENTLEY TO THE HOTEL TO MY OWN WAYS

38 Wednesday: Rat Saw God

~ Lex Leeson ~ 5 Comments

Firstly, how fucking pissed much the band be that Netflix did that thing and it was such a big hit? Fucking decimated their SEO.

Secondly, if Jenna Ortega really did quit Scream VII (there are seven of those things now??) in protest over their co-star being axed after their support of Palestine, then good for them. It’s not much, but it’s something.

Thirdly, doesn’t ‘Jenna Ortega’ sound like the name of some fleet-footed Argentinian Boca Juniors winger that Atletico Madrid have shown an interest in signing?

Fourthly, the Argentinian footballer’s first name would obviously be pronounced with a really raspy ‘H’ sound, like ‘Hhhhhhhhhhhhhenna Ortega’.

I ORDERED TWO MORE WINES ‘CAUSE TONIGHT I WANT HIM

The Necessary Evil Hall of Fame: Gold Star Artists

~ Lex Leeson ~ 21 Comments
  • At least three albums
  • All albums featured on the Necessary Evil best of year countdown

I’ve been doing this dumb blog that nobody reads since my first post on the 1st December 2014 called the latest Pixies album an “especially grievous dirty protest”. 2024’s list was the tenth I’ve written in excruciating detail on the blog. The intelligent thing to do would be to call it a day after that. But then again the really intelligent thing to would have been to never start it in the first place. As a stupid person, I’m definitely conflicted. My (recorded) albums of the year go back to 2007. I’m not wanting to put too fine a point on it, nor am I at all pompous enough to ever overexaggerate my importance, but I think it’s fair to say that I am objectively the paramount and most respected voice on music of the last 15 years. And before that too, I just didn’t have a blog then.

Pulitzer Prize stuff from 2019

But what about the artists themselves? They sometimes play a part in the psychosexual agitprop magic of this blog. We can obviously consider the artists whose work has appeared most in my year end lists, but that’s obviously going to be the Manics (eleven + one very decent JDB solo record and one dreadful Nick Wire one), Prince (eleven, and eventually all 42 of the fuckers) and Nick Cave (I think around eleven, over a variety of projects). Like, duh much? We can all agree without any argument at all that these are the three most important musical artists of all time. It’s like if someone says their favourite food is “crisps”. Like, of course it’s crisps. Crisps are amazing. Everyone loves crisps. But what does that tell you about them as a person?? No, we need a different gage to work out the real stars of Necessary Evil.

Continue reading “The Necessary Evil Hall of Fame: Gold Star Artists” →

#10 The Hotelier: It Never Goes Out

~ Lex Leeson ~ 3 Comments

We leave our higher educations that we all ‘must’ get
With a signature stamped paper and a mound of debt
The bank has got us by the throat and then we’re forced to settle
For the jobs we hate, 9 to 5, 40 hour, 40 years ’til the day
We are too weak to work, too frail to play
No friends or lovers because they all passed away
We’ve waited for this day all our lives long
And on our death bed the stereo plays our favorite teenage anthem song
And we sing along

Our Lives Would Make a Sad, Boring Movie

We into the top ten, God dammit! With, another album was wasn’t actually released this year: The Hotelier’s 2011 debut album that I just needed to complete my set.

I KEEP CHOKING ON MY FEARS

#14 Marina and the Diamonds: Electra Heart (Platinum Blonde)

~ Lex Leeson ~ 6 Comments

Holy shit! Happy birthday ‘Electra Heart’!

Starburst? Yeah, fuck that kid

NE2022 enters into a strange ‘rerelease zone’ for these next three entries. I can’t remember if I did this intentionally. It’s difficult to consider ‘classic’ albums alongside newer material. You need to balance out any nostalgia and the unfair ten year start that some records have had to burrow into your subconscious. Yet you don’t want to go too far the other way, and fail to remember the original spark and energy that was originally locked within a song you’ve heard fifteen thousand fucking times already. You can’t give too much weight to cultural importance… but you certainly can’t just blindly ignore it. It’s an extremely complicated equation that I honestly don’t believe anyone reading this will be intelligent enough to fully grasp. Or, I just realised there were a lot of amazing rereleases this year and didn’t want them all clogging up the top ten, so parked them all just outside. Two releases still escaped and made the top ten. There are five records in the top 15 that weren’t released in 2022. Shut up. Ah do warra want!

YOU DON’T LOVE ME? BIG FUCKING DEAL

#35 Saba: Few Good Things

~ Lex Leeson ~ 1 Comment

Hustlin’ candy bars to play basketball
I still get nostalgic seein’ houses that my family lost
They wished upon a star, I caught it like I’m Randy Moss
When granny fought for her property, she would turn down any cost
I’m the grandson of Carl who lived across from the fosters
Then fostered me to spread love through holiday poverty
Hand-me-downs I was given, I thought they were bought for me
A tale of two Chicagos, this gets confused commonly
‘Cause one, you’re commemorated if you’re the hot commodity

Free Samples

Comrade Saba!

Is there an industry less concerned with ethics and more damaging to the general populace yet still so accepted as the real estate market? I’m not going to delve to deeply into it here, but the correct position to take is that all landlords are scum. If you own more than one house, you’re at the very best low key scum. Property development and large landlord associations are actually beyond scum and actually evil. I may be against the death penalty in its current widely accepted form, but we as a society need to seriously look at what horrors are accepted in our current decaying capitalism and make big decisions to punish the minority for their crimes against humanity, especially if it benefits the vast majority. That’s all I’m going to say right now. Unless there’s an album coming up soon that I can’t think of anything to say about. I will always reserve my right to go off on a massive far left tangent. Here’s ‘Britain’s Road to Socialism‘ again, give it a read (or a listen).

AND NOW BACK TO OUR SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING

#46 Zeal & Ardor: Zeal and Ardor

~ Lex Leeson ~ 4 Comments

Listen to Z&A’s third full length album, listen to how this bafflingly overlooked Swiss band manage to combine a myriad of genres from soul to gospel to electronica to blues and house them all under a single roof of the blackest of black metal, listen to that at once hilarious and at once terrifying jump cut Emersion makes from BandCamp bedroom electro-pop into screaming death thrash, listen to this band redefine what could be considered heavy rock music for 44 minutes. Then come back to me, I want to see your face when I tell you that this is by far the most straightforward and standard record the band have yet made.

This is all relative, of course: Zeal & Ardor’s ‘normal’ is a far cry from that of plebs like you and I. We still get key changes, electronic swathes, and a near exhausting amount of tropes and genres paid service to. It’s just that compared to the incredibly creative places that the band have dragged their music to over their past two albums (plus 2020’s incredible ‘Wake of a Nation’ EP) their latest often sounds like the band instead turning more inwards and congregating all their visions into making a record that’s slightly more recognisable as ‘metal’.

AND HOW WELL DO THEY DO THAT?

#56 Lykke Li: EYEYE

~ Lex Leeson ~ 5 Comments

Lykke Lykke Lykke! EYEYEYE!!!

Sponsored by anti-acne treatment, because wrestling is for adults

Sweden’s absolute and inarguable queen of pop heartbreak might be another artist on this year’s list suffering from their insane decision to be consistently brilliant throughout their career and making the risky move of simply releasing another brilliant record. Like, well done, you’re still incredible. ‘Ave a fackin’ biscuit.

I WOULD ACTUALLY APPRECIATE A BISCUIT RIGHT NOW