31 Los Thuthanaka: Los Thuthanaka

Dec 6, 2025 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

We all agree that is was William S. Burroughs or maybe Miles Davis or maybe Thelonious Monk or maybe Charles Mingus or maybe Frank Zappa or maybe George Carlin or maybe Martin Mull or maybe Lester Bangs or maybe David Byrne or maybe Steve Martin or maybe Elvis Costello or maybe Laurie Anderson who first coined the phrase “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. I’d like to formally call that out today, and to officially deign William/Miles/Thelonious/Charles/Frank/George /Martin/David /Steve/Elvis/Laurie out as a grade A bullshit artist. You don’t dance ‘about’ anything, you utter cretin, you dance to things. What if I write about a holiday I had? Would that be like playing darts about synchronised swimming? Was that food review I wrote like building Lego about the Paris Climate Accord? When Pablo Picasso painted about the Spanish Civil War, might he as well have been trellising a fence about Celeste speedrunning?

You’re full of shit William/Miles/Thelonious/Charles/Frank/George /Martin/David /Steve/Elvis/Laurie!!!

Not you, Lester Bangs, you’re alright. He was probably making a similarly good point to the first paragraph of this post. Many consider Bangs to be very much the Alex Franchise-Palmer of his day.

The Queer People-Medicines Are Here

The Legit Bosses:136 Best Tracks of 2018

Jan 6, 2019Sep 28, 2019 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 9 Comments

This is officially the end of 2018! And it’s only the 5th January [EDIT: Still only the 6th!]! Although there’s freaking one hundred and thirty six tracks to get through, so this may well take until mid May! Happy Cinco de Mayo! No time to talk! A shit load of songs to get through!!

136 Candace: Rewind

Gorgeous, innit?

135 Epic Reflexes: Cha Cha

While Z-Tape’s ‘Spring’ collection was veritably busting at the seems with Legit Bosses, as you’ll soon see, this is the only similarly legitimate position of authority from their ‘Summer’ collection. They’re all still great though, as is the Epic Reflexes’s album ‘ChaChaChinatown‘.

134 The Carters: Apeshit

I had a lot of problems with ‘Everything is Love’, the surprising debut release from Beyonce and Jay-Z. Part of the reason I struggled with it was that I wasn’t sure how canonical it is. Like, is this it, Bee? Is this underwhelming collection of occasionally very entertaining rap boasts officially your actual follow-up to one of the most acclaimed albums of the 21st century? It’s an album about how two very rich people love each other but probably love their money more, that includes the line “My grandchildren’s grandchildren already rich” which, despite Kanye’s crisis of publicity, is by far the line from 2018 that Donald Trump is most likely to high five in a men’s locker room. Also, there’s a moment on the opening track where Mr Carter drawls out “Let it breaaaathe, let it breaaaathe” like JB Rockefeller basking in the glory of a fart he’d just released under the bedsheets, which marks the first time in more than two decades that I’ve thought to myself that I don’t think I really like Jay-Z. However, he often wins me back with the later claim that he’s “Good on any MLK boulevard”. This song’s pretty great though

Fucking hell, Jay, that haircut though… One hundred and thirty three more after the jump!

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8 Kids See Ghosts: Kids See Ghosts

Jan 1, 2019 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 4 Comments

Guys, it’s absolutely fine to have a full album revolve around one song. Already on this list, we’ve had fantastic albums by Laurie Anderson and Kronos Collective (which basically centres around the strings kicking in on Nothing Left But Their Names) and Son Lux (so obviously centred around ensuring All Directions‘ impact is maximised) carefully and artfully centre their records around ensuring one particular genius song hits the listener just there.

This isn’t a slight on the albums. Just because a record centres its impact around one particular song it doesn’t mean the rest of the record isn’t utter genius. It doesn’t even have to necessarily be the best song on the record. ‘OK Computer’ is obviously designed to build up the euphoria when that guitar solo hits in Lucky, much like Best Record Of 2009™ ‘Tarot Sport‘ is constructed so that you lose your shit when Olympians kicks in almost exactly at the record’s middle, while Hotel California is obviously centred around Hotel California because it’s the first track and only song off the album that I or anyone else actually knows*, and ‘Bad Intentions’ by Dappy just wouldn’t be one of the most reverred albums of the 21st century were it not for the musical break in Yin Yang where Dappy recites the stages in the five step Razgar test and wryly questions what Roland Barthes would have said such constrictions on Appendix FM in the immigration law.

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46 Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet: Landfall

Dec 16, 2018 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 4 Comments

“You know the reason I really love the stars? It’s that we cannot hurt
Them. We can’t burn them. We can’t melt them or make them overflow
We can’t flood them or blow them up or turn them out
But we are reaching for them. We are reaching for them”

In a strange way, the influential 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth might have unintentionally and semi-ironically doomed us all. It has had very inconvenient consequences, you could say. But absolutely don’t, because that’s a rotten line.

Now, I’m not arguing that An Inconvenient Truth didn’t do a lot of good. I was.. younger… when it came out, and I have to say that, while maybe not a climate change denier, I was probably sceptical of the threat based on my own scientific research uncovering statistics like the fact it snowed a couple of years back and it was sometimes really cold. The film actually convinced me of the facts, using simple statistics and arguments that, if I’m being honest, I was probably too lazy to read for myself. I was a child, I decided that believing that climate change was at least overstated would mean I needn’t change anything about my behaviour, and so only searched out articles and columns that supported the theory I had chosen to believe. I was a child. I saw An Inconvenient Truth and realised what a child I was being. And how stupid I was. I imagine many people had similar epiphanies upon watching it. I was a child, and I still can’t believe how stupid I was. A child,

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