16 Young Fathers: Heavy Heavy

Dec 13, 2023Jan 27, 2024 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 1 Comment

I want your shield
I want your weapon
Gimme that bulletproof vest
And don’t forget I’m not susceptible to your nonsense
I’m a winner

No falling for your charms
No crash into your arms
Handful of coins
And a balled-up fist
Picking rubbish
Cleaning rubbish
I Saw

Aw, man, Young fucking Fathers, dudes??

They’re up there with Janelle Monae as Necessary Evil legends – and given the cultural importance of this blog that essentially makes them musical legends of the past fifteen years – with a simply inscrutable back catalogue that now demands they’re expected to meet higher standards than their peers. Like, I really loved the RobinPlaysChords album, but am I unconsciously and immediately setting it against some of the greatest music of the century? This means artists like Young Fathers, Let’s Eat Grandma, and Janelle – the most golden of Gold Star Artists – are, unfortunately and perhaps unfairly, held to a higher standards than mere mortals like Lauren Auder.

YOU’RE ASKING ME MY SYMPTOMS, DOCTOR, I DON’T WANNA FEEL

My Life in Albums (part 2 97-06)

May 17, 2020May 19, 2020 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 8 Comments

You want an intro? You got that in part one! Let’s get down to the dirty, sticky and dangerously unhygienic business:

1997

This was an important year for me, this was when shit got real. Yeah, Labour won the election, which I was aware I was supposed to celebrate but not yet conscious enough to know exactly why, just that ‘our team won*. Princess Diana died, inspiring a nationwide reaction that even 13 year old Alex Palmer recognised as being a bit fucking much**. All that was meaningless background noise though, as most importantly 1997 was the year that I became really switched on to new music. Before this point, most of the albums I’ve listed would have been discovered by me later and posthumously lusted after in the kind of nostalgic necrophilia that I would later grow to despise. Yeah, sorry if you’ve already imagined me as an incredibly cool seven year old bopping his head to Soon by My Bloody Valentine. From this point on, these important albums in my life and personal development were pretty much all discovered as contemporaries. Seriously though, ‘It’s Great When You’re Straight… Yeah’ was the first CD that I ever owned. Yeah. I’m that cool/weird.

“Dad, this is why you’re only allowed to see me one weekend every other month…”

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Rumble in the Bumble pt 10: 500TH POST SPECTACULAR!!!!

May 8, 2020Dec 22, 2020 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 3 Comments

Yes, believe it or not that blog title’s true and, no, I’m not doing one of my ‘bits’. As will later become evident, this is going to become far too serious a post to do ‘bits’. Apart from all those ‘bits’ that I’ll inevitably do. They don’t count. This is actually the 500th piece of aggressively partisan and dangerously unedited nonsense that I’ve reached down into my spleen to messily smear the blood and puss across my computer screen, since I first started uploading my albums of the year to this poorly designed WordPress blog that nobody reads in December 2014. I’ve written this piece of shit for almost exactly five and a half years!! That’s roughly 2000 days, so I’ve written on average a post every four days, which would sound like this was a regularly updated blog, wouldn’t it? But, no, you usually get a whole year’s worth of posts in December, and you’re happy. Much like your Mum, this blog comes very loaded towards the back.

But this calls for a celebration, no?? I, of course, planned ahead, and purchased a rather snazzy hat:

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42 Pixx: The Age of Anxiety

Mar 11, 2018Mar 23, 2018 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 1 Comment

Anxious Geography

“Here me/Hear me cry out/Everything is weird in/America”

America is a different country from Britain. Like, completely different: it has its own laws and everything, and is entirely full of people who are very different from the people in the UK. Not only is there a lot more of them but, let’s face it, a lot of them are probably a lot fatter, so their combined weight of humanity would be so much more that it would render Britain’s almost inconsequential.

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