Sir! Yes sir, hand’s up, definitely talking about me
WALK AROUND RUSHOLME LIKE I’M JOHN WAYNE#22 Denzel Curry: Melt My Eyez See Your Future
Tag: lil peep
A Brief and Inadequate Mimi Parker Tribute
A friend and I are both similarly shameless man boys, and are equally shameless enough in our arrested emotional and intellectual development to get together once every week to watch old wrestling PPV events from the early 00s, 90s, 80s and – if we’re feeling especially fruity and devil may care in our appreciation of video quality – even the 1970s. After each event – some amazing; some unintentionally hilarious; many, many, many absolutely fucking awful – we look back at the evening’s entertainment, give each match a star rating, hand out our individual awards. And read out the Death List. The Death List is the number of wrestlers and personalities we’d witnessed perform that night at an event forty, thirty. twenty or even just ten years ago who were now no longer with us.
It’s unquestionably a morbid joke, one that never allows us to forget the insanely short expected lifespan of professional wrestlers, particularly those from the steroids n’ cocaine heydays of the so called Golden Era, from the 80s to early 90s. Despite our flippancy, it’s not a completely disrespectful exercise, it’s rarely less than depressing to note how many great talents were lost to us early by being sucked into such a thoughtless and treacherous business. It never allows us to forget that people are killing themselves and being killed just in order to provide us with our shits and giggles. Considering that I’ve only been writing these lists since 2007, and in an era when musicians’ and pop artists’ lifespan is considerably longer than your average professional wrestler, it’s not a trope I’d ever imagined repeating for my Necessary Evil end of year countdown.
Continue reading “A Brief and Inadequate Mimi Parker Tribute”Rumble in the Bumble pt.2
Part one
So Bumble is installed, time to open my account, type in my details and…
Aw man! So we’re straight in there, are we? No ‘How you doing?’, no ‘Nice to meet you’, no ‘Tell us about the two months you spent in Bologna studying clownlogy’. No, we’re straight into the meat market. Give us your ugly mug so that people can harshly judge your entire being based on the milliseconds your fat face spends on their smartphone while they’re on the toilet taking a particularly rough dump, before they swipe you left into oblivion. Well, dang, if people are so shallow that my photo is really going to be of such uppermost importance, I guess I’ll have to make sure I take a good one.
Necessary Evil 2019 (82-80)
82 Le Makeup: Aisou
That cover intrigues me. If we move the camera back, will we just see Keisuke Iiri with his arm’s out wide pulling a roll of cling film over his face? It’d ruin the illusion somewhat, wouldn’t it?
Listen, I have no fucking idea who this guy is. His name is Keisuke Iiri, his Twitter seems to suggest that he’s legitimately Japanese, and he’s made one of the most accomplished and sonically arresting dance albums of 2019. That’s all. This is awesome, I’m awesome, you’re awesome, and Le Makeup are awesome.
Keisuke, if you’re reading this, keep it up.
Metacritic: n/a
The Legit Bosses: Best 65 Tracks of 2017
EDIT: a full 16 days after publishing this piece, I finally got round to making a Spofify Playlist. The best songs of 2017. In May 2018)
OK, 20th April and we’re almost done. Never apologise for your own timing: genius cannot be standardised by your plebeian calendar. Good things are always worth waiting for. Patience, motherfuckers, patience.
Remember (kayfabe) last year, when I broke the Legit Bosses down into about a million parts? Ten freaking YouTube videos every post?
That was a really dumb idea. You’re getting all 65 songs in one list this year.
There were exactly sixty five amazing songs released last year. If you believe that there were any more or less then you are either massively mistaken or just plain stupid. Listen and learn:
65 Vince Staples: Alyssa Interlude
Finding out that the voice sample explaining the pain that’s sometimes needed to inspire creativity is actually Amy Winehouse pushed this interlude into ‘AMAZING’ classification.
Barely two minutes long, but exhibiting the kind of experimental genius that was slightly lacking on the rest of the album. More of this in the future please, Mr Staples, and less of… erm…
Less of, like, whatever I said in my review. It was quite a long time ago…
64 Young M.A: M.A Intro
Freaking perfect introduction to the record, which I can’t help but shout along to the “Who dat?/Who dat?/Never who dat” intro with all the gusto and passion a middle aged white guy is legally allowed.
63 St Vincent: Los Ageless
Despite what my review may have led you to believe, not actually about my ex-wife wrongly claiming credit for my suicide.
My ex-wife read that review, by the way, and got in touch to correct a lot of my false assumptions. Yeah, I’ll definitely talk about that at some point. Make sure to click ‘subscribe’…
62 Tove Lo: Hey You Got Drugs
A lovely ballad about a subject that I think is vastly underrepresented in sad songs. I may have slightly overrated it in my review of the album, which shows how relatively underwhelming the rest of the album is.
Also: invest in a comma maybe, Ms Lo?
Stats Off To You, Sir 2017
The Only Reason I Do This Fucking List
Yaaaay!! A statistical breakdown of 2017’s albums!! Suddenly, all those wasted evenings desperately bashing out 1000 words of utter shite on Muna or something finally comes to fruition!! I get to do a mathematical breakdown of the findings!! Kinda get tired reading more than 100 words but enjoy looking at pretty pictures? Yeah, me too…
This post is just for you!!
21 EMA: Exile in the Outer Ring
The Rejection of Comprehensive Reviews
Well, two out of three ain’t bad (I turned 34 after the song was released)
I’m not going to be able to give the next handful of albums the usual insightful and in depth investigation that by this point you’ve come accustomed to.
You see, my previous entry intensely debating the artistic choices made on St Vincent‘s recent album was just so emotionally draining, that I worry that if I shake have head over my keyboard there simply won’t be enough viscous creativity juice left to pour out over my next few reviews.
Regardless: here is Emalina McFunnel Armitage with her third solo album. It’s brilliant, for many of the reasons I pointed out in my 2014 reaction to her previous record.
29 Future: Future
Emptiness, Nihilism, Emptiness
No artist on this list (few that you’ll encounter on any of the lists I produce once a year by screaming at the unfairness of life and smashing my tearing ducts against the keyboard) have taken me quite as much time to truly understand than Future. Now way near as much time.
Firstly, Future (real name ‘Marty McFly’, so he thought he best play up to the assumptions of time travel) is simply extremely difficult to keep track of: he releases albums and mixtapes at roughly the same rate that you might decide it’s time to buy new shower gel. He released two albums this year, and I had to decide to cull ‘Hndrxx’ from NE2017 when it became clear space was premium, and I had to start considering proper vowel usage as a prerequisite. His 2016 mixtape ‘Purple Reign’ was also unlucky not to make the cut (kayfabe) last year (sadly, due to its obvious play to my affections). He even released another mixtape in late 2017, which, I mean, come on Future, give a guy a break!
30 Alvvays: Antisocialites
The Only Socialising You’ll Need
I like to think the 2017 Necessary Evil list has so far catered to a lot of different tastes and requirements:
You’ve had Mark Lenegan , for those who want gravelly voiced ginger reminding them of a time when rock music was really cool; you’ve had Lil Yachty, for those of you who want your hip-hop history disregarded and even defiled on top of saccharine pop beats; Lil Peep, for those of you who just want to soundtrack their own descent into drug-induced senselessness, overwhelmed by life’s cruel meaningless; Arca, for those of you who don’t really want to enjoy the music they listen to rather, have it drill its own importance into their cerebral cortex and splatter its definite artistic statement over the wall behind; and Björk, for the people who… erm… well I still haven’t quite figured out who that album’s for. Perhaps just Björk…
36 Ghostpoet: Dark Days + Canapes
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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