#14 Les Savy Fav: OUI, LSF

Dec 16, 2024Dec 16, 2024 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 1 Comment

I’m turning 50 soon. The last time we recorded something as Les Savy Fav, I was about 40. Around that time, I had a serious mental health crisis – I got diagnosed with bipolar and had been manic for a long time, then went very depressed. Getting out of that took a couple of years and was really dramatic for me and my family. I’ve always identified with a Peter Pan type universe, so I was trying to figure out how to square the person you see on stage, which is core to who I am, with the person that wants to be able to afford pants…

I then got laid off from my job and that was super stressful. Turns out I hated that job. I hadn’t really thought about it, but all of a sudden I realised I had spent so much energy annoyed by this thing, that when it went away, it was like clarity. I was writing music, I was writing lyrics, and it wasn’t just because I had more free time. It was about mental space and realising how much energy it takes to grind an axe. I think that’s where so many people get stuck.

Frontman Tim Harrington briefly lets Crack Magazine what he’s been up to for the past 14 years, 24.02.16

Les Savy motherfucking Sav, bitches!

Les Savy Fav last made this list when they were ranked number seven in 2007, on the oldest of these lists that I’ve ever been able to track down and post online. Anthony Kliedis’s girlfriend wasn’t even born when this band last (and first) made the Necessary Evil countdown. And even seventeen years ago, I was laughably late to the party. Gimme a break though: I was a married, fuckable 23 year old with a social life, easy access to drugs, and functioning alcoholism, so I was kinda busy, yeah?? LSF had been a going concern since 1995 and had released their debut single in 1997. Those who knew about them were instant converts – here’s a Pitchfork piece from 1998 describing the band playing to a one person crowd and the writer still being won over – but for the first decade or so of their career despite inspiring devotion from those lucky enough to experience them, even freaking Jesus had more disciples than these guys. Yeah, I realise that Jesus is a pretty big deal these days, but to have only twelve disciples in his own lifetime is pretty pathetic, guy just wasn’t a draw. I’m not denying Jesus’s influence! Just that he was more like the Velvet Underground: only twelve people followed him at the time but each one wrote a book about him.

Baraa Mohamed Fawzi Shaldan

15 Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter: SAVED!

Dec 13, 2023Jan 27, 2024 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

Religion sounds like a hoot, doesn’t it? Like, imagine if you were into Live Action Roleplaying/LARP or civil war re-enactments, you loved all the play pretend that you had to work within (“Put your phone away, Stuart!”), loved these artificial rules that you’re being asked to work under. And then some weirdo, probably wearing a cloak and maybe a golden hat, comes up to you and says “A’ight, that’s cool and all, but I’ve got a game that you have to play you’re whole life, and if you break any of our artificial rules, you’ll burn in hell for eternity!!” That’d be pretty dope, no?

*the next step after atheism is ‘TikTok Live NPCs’*

Mate, religion is some next level LARPing. You’re always in the game because this God, or these Gods, they’re everywhere, all the time, and they can see everything you do. And the punishment for breaking the rules isn’t just some sinbin, or a disapproving look from Janet because they don’t believe you should be wearing New Balance sneakers if you’re supposed to be an Elemental Elf. If you get the rules wrong, this God character – or these God characters – will burn your soul for eternity!! And you thought Rio getting eight months for missing that drug test was excessive! And yes, that is the most recent cultural reference I can think of! Oh, and some of these Gods have, like, lions for heads and shit, you do not want to fuck with them. Seriously, they’re metal as fuck.

TOKE THIS JOINT HOW I’M BLOWIN’ THIS STEAM

#29 Anna von Hausswolff: Live at Montreux Jazz Festival

Dec 14, 2022 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 3 Comments

Bwa-haha! Yes! Yes! I know it was all I needed, I know that all it would take to lift me out of my stupor was a visit from my old friend, the big man downstairs, lord fire and brimstone, Georgia’s best fiddler (in every sense! Bwa-haha!), The Big D with the Big D, the Antipope, Red (Dante’s version), I Love Lucifer, Orbital’s 1996 number 3 hit, Mr Rin Tin Sin, The Devil himself!

Or herself. I’d like to think we’ve reached a stage now where we#re comfortable with the devil being a woman. If you met my ex-wife, you definitely agree.

OOOOOOOOOOH! #CANCELLED

Necessary Evil 2020 pt.12 (20-16)

Dec 19, 2020Dec 7, 2024 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 11 Comments

Oh my God! The top twenty! If you’re interested in a bit of insider knowledge, this has been the most difficult list to write yet, it’s caused way more stress in my personal life than any before it, and it’s getting harder and harder to defend as a humungous drain on my time. This may well be the final countdown I do. Unless you all start giving me money of course. Just leave the bank notes in a burlap sack near the aqueducts, as per usual.

Six more entries to go!!

#20 Hinds: The Prettiest Curse

“I don’t want your compassion
‘Cause I was built for action“

Hinds released their 2016 debut as an amazing idea for a band but frustratingly without the tunes to back up their sizeable identities. Their second album, 2018’s ‘I Don’t Run‘, was a welcome and marked leap up in quality, with the band obviously coming on leaps and bounds as songwriters and performers. This improvement has continued at such a pace that, with the release of their third album this year, they can legitimately now be considered one of the greatest indie rock bands in the world.

Yeah, this post is going to be a little shorter, just so you know.

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7 FKA Twigs: Magdalene

Dec 26, 2019Dec 26, 2019 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 7 Comments

“Didn’t I do it for you?”

‘Magdalene’, despite it often raising both the tempo and intensity, sounds like one, thirty nine minute cry of exasperation. Isn’t this enough? Do you all somehow want more? Didn’t I, as it were, do it, if you will, for, one could argue, you?

20160722T0954-0425-CNS-SARAH-MAGDALENE-FEAST — “Fuuuuuuuuuuck thiiiiiiiiiiiiis….”

FKA Twigs is looking at the consequences of her labour, both emotional and physical (something something fibroid tumours something something “fruit bowl of pain“), and is at once incensed and dejected that it’s seemingly all been for nothing. Her sacrifices in the past mean nothing now and she’s not the one who gets to decide how she’s perceived. No matter how much she learns to love herself, her body, and whomever else decides to share that love at certain points, they can all turn against her at whim and make all of this adoration seem wasted. “Sure, Alex”, I hear you craw, not deigning the situation important enough to stop shoving food into your fat mouth as you speak to me so that with every vowel sound I can see disgusting mushes of Tangy Cheese Doritos swirling around your decaying teeth, “you’re an amazing, Pulitzer-Prize level writer and I, for one, am enthralled, but what’s this all got to do with Mary Magdalene, that tart with the heart who washed Jesus’s feet with her hair, the filthy tramp, and who Dan Brown tells me painted The Last Supper, or something?”

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeell…

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64 Kanye West: Jesus is King (& no.63)

Dec 5, 2019Dec 5, 2019 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 7 Comments

“Everybody wanted ‘Yandhi’/But Jesus Christ did the laundry”

So Kanye ditched ‘Yandhi‘, which was late in its production and looked like it might become very worthwhile, to instead work on a completely new album. OK. I mean, switching projects completely so rapidly and frequently might not bode well for general standards of quality, but who am I to speak about artistic methods? I do this list every year and yet still manage to never let the quality slip below pelvis shattering power, so I’m sure lesser artists like Kanye will be able to ensure standards are still high. And it’s a gospel album?! Well colour me intrigued! Perhaps Kanye will be able to put similar spins on (and analysis of) the genre as Chance the Rapper did on ‘Coloring Book‘! Back when Chance was good! Perhaps, in the future, we will look back on ‘Yandhi’ as Kanye’s ‘Black Album‘, Prince’s mythical 1987 album that he allegedly dropped work on after experiencing a spiritual epiphany while on pills* and decide to instead focus on the gorgeous paean to the struggles of good over evil (and, y’know, shagging) that was ‘Lovesexy‘. Perhaps something happened to Kanye similar to Prince coming up and seeing the light. Kanye West doesn’t take good drugs though, guy has far too much upper body tension, so it’d be an experience more suited to him. Maybe he saw someone else wearing leather jogging pants- his invention!!- and it just pushed him over the edge. Maybe he realised the president he’s such a fan of is an unashamed racist and wants many of his fans removed from the country. Hard to say. Perhaps ‘Yandhi’ will finally receive a proper release in 7 years time and people will be ever so slightly disappointed

(*described as a ‘bad experience on MDMA’ in the Wikipedia article, which, hehehe, no. Taking a pill and then deciding to drop the darker work you’re doing in favour of positive stuff that tries to bring love to everyone isn’t a ‘bad experience on MDMA’, it’s just what happens when you take pills)

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Necessary Evil 2019 (72-65)

Dec 4, 2019Dec 14, 2019 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 12 Comments

72 Kanye West: Yandhi

You know what? I’ve got a funny feeling that this might not be my last chance to talk about him before this list is done, so I’m wary of squeezing out all my Kanye Juice before the real party starts. ‘Yandhi’ was the album that he was going to release as his follow up to last year’s ‘Ye‘ (I’m sorry, haterz/liberals, but ‘Ye’ was a pretty fine album, as were most of the eighty four records he released last year, let’s not let our reactions to his general behavior colour the history), but then it was delayed, then cancelled, then briefly revived with Ashton Kutcher playing the role of Kanye West, then delayed, then its name was changed to ‘Spunk Muffin and the Dudes With Attitude’, then it was cancelled again, then it was changed to ‘Jesus Is King’, then it was revealed that it wasn’t actually a name change but a completely separate record, then that record was delayed, then it was delayed again, until, finally, it was released, and Yandhi was cancelled, only briefly being released (seriously) as ringtones. Quite straightforward as Kanye West album launches go, really. I actually only sought out ‘Yandhi’ because I assumed it would contain intriguing scrappy demos of whatever tracks Kanye was working on for his next record (which at that point had been delayed so many times I assumed this would be the closest we’d get to a Kanye album this year), but it’s shocking to hear quite how complete a lot of songs on here are, and how realised many ideas are. New Body in particular sounds less than a tweak away from being a hit single, Nicki Minaj feature and all. Later, it was shocking how few of the songs and ideas on ‘Yandhi’ made it to ‘Jesus is King’. Like, pretty much none of it. Nicki Minaj? She’s gone. Hey, Kanye, maybe stay focused on one thing for more than three minutes? Might result in better albums? Perhaps I’ll get to debate this further later.

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60 Soccer Mommy: Clean

Dec 13, 2018Sep 30, 2023 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 17 Comments

By many definitions of the word, I’ve been ‘clean’ for about three years now.

By which I mean I no longer drink alcohol. As for other drugs, I’m fond of saying that “I’m either never high or high all the time, depending on how you look at it” due to the cocktail of prescription drugs I consider essential to my psychological upkeep and the fact I’m a stone cold banter merchant. However, as wry and cheeky as the statement may be, it’s not strictly true, and a far more accurate statement would be “I’m either never high, but sometimes really fucking high, or high all the time, and sometimes really fucking high, depending in how you look at it”, as I still enjoy recreational drugs. Because of course I do- drugs are awesome. Kids, just say ‘yes’. If more kids tried drugs we’d have far less problems in the world as potential alcoholics discover a cleaner way to search for the experience of another body. I mean, yeah, sure, we’d have a lot more heroin and crack cocaine addicts, but you’ve got to break a few omelettes to make a good egg, or something

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72 Phew: Voice Hardcore

Dec 4, 2018 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 11 Comments

The 1976 movie ‘Snuff’ is a pretty by the numbers meat and potatoes early slasher flick, revolving around the exploits of some n’er do well bikers in South America. The leader of the bikers is called ‘Satan’, which you have to imagine they planned to change at one point. The movie becomes rather notable at its end though.

The film ends with a pregnant actress being stabbed (it was very much that kind of movie), but then we hear the director shout ‘cut’ and the camera pulls away from the action and back to reveal the full movie set. Cameras, crew and director. As the crew pack up their shit, happy with the results of the obvious $72 that went into making the film, a script girl approaches the director and confesses what an admirer she is of his work. She also, predictably, tells him how the violent scene turned her on, because bitches be craaaaaaazeeeeeee!

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36 Ghostpoet: Dark Days + Canapes

Mar 14, 2018Mar 14, 2018 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

But He Doesn’t Ghostknowit

Imagine being the actual ghost of a poet? It’d be a rather unfortunately ironic existence by my thinking: you’d be overloaded with material to be all poetic about- your odes on the loneliness of death and the unease inspired looming threat of being ghostbusted at any time would be stone cold classics– yet you’d be unable to broadcast your genius to the wider world!!

Sure, you can chuck a verse or two Derek Acorah’s way, but he’s far too much of a egotist to give you proper credit when he broadcasts your work, and he’ll most likely claim that he wrote most of the best stuff himself. You’d be screaming your lungs out accusing him of plagiarism, and the only person who can hear you is Derek! What a palaver!!

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