#47 Perfume Genius: Ugly Season

Picture the scene: an American dude called Mike Hadreas walks into a bar. Now, this bar is in America. Obviously, Mike still doesn’t trust that the danger posed by COVID to yet feel confident enough to contemplate long haul travel. Sure he could go to Mexico – which if you look at a map you’ll see is to the South of the USA – but he’s smart enough to know that Mexico produces Corona beer so he’s not foolhardy enough to take that kind of risk, and he is well read enough to have noted a number of Facebook posts shared by his Uncle that actually place the blame for the Coronavirus outbreak squarely at Mexico’s door. Mike feels that there isn’t enough evidence to confidently state any interpretation of the facts he’s seen. He’s just asking questions. He could also go to Canada, which is commonly referred to as being ‘above’ the USA, but that’s simply due to centuries old Eurocentric indoctrination regarding the supposed superiority of the (richer, whiter) global north over the (poorer, browner) global south. Canada is actually to the north of the USA. But Mr Hadreas has heard that Canada is full of sexual predators and cultural genocide, so that’s out. Charity basketball game? No thank you, Mr Butler, says Mike Hadreas. No, Mike will be visiting a bar in the good ol’ US of USA. ‘Over the pond’. Except Mike Hadreas won’t be crossing any pond. Because he lives there.

Now, again, Mike Hadreas is in America – I think I mentioned it – so this wouldn’t be one of your standard old English style pubs that my readership in this part of the country might be picturing. There’s no intimate wooden interiors; there’s no dartboard; there’s no border collie, soaking wet from that morning’s walk, sleeping next to an open fireplace. There’s no old man with a stick sat on his own in the corner. Being all racist. No, this is an American bar.

YOUR PAINTING BEAUTIFUL PICTURES IN MY MIND

#53 Tanya Tagaq: Tongues

Canada! Throw another steak on the barbie and… No, that’s the other one isn’t it? Throw another poutine on the Mike Myers, aye! We all love Canada, don’t we? They’re like the USA it’s OK to like! So polite! So, like, a bit American, but not offensively so, but then also a little bit English, so that’s OK! There are bits of it that are French, I believe, but I don’t really have time to logically process that right now. Those white Canadians, they’ve, like, always been there, right? There was never any indefensible stripping of natives’ land, like there was in the USA, as far as I – wider culture – am aware of. No old Canadian movies celebrating the Canadian John Wayne brutally murdering the native population, so I have to assume that it never happened. Who’s the Canadian John Wayne, I hear you ask? Probably Drake. No, I can’t explain it, it just probably is, I dunno. Oh Canada! That’s how the anthem starts, innit? Lovely country, lovely people, such a lovely counterpoint to all the divisive silliness that happened ‘down south’! Shows that actually, yes, it is possible to build a civilised society over there.

GREAT! I REALLY NEED THIS BREAK…

35 Big $ilky: Big $ilky vol.3

2020 #26, 2020 #27

I changed so much since ‘Volume 1’

I don’t give a fuck who don’t like me…

Pandemic illuminates darkness

Uprisings just hit me the hardest

And all you virtue signalling fucks

Will not get to sample the harvest

Jesse Got Away

Hey. Hey. Hey you. Yeah, you, future cultural historian. Yeah. I’m contacting you from the past. Wooooooooooo! Wait… no, I’m not a ghost, am I? Scrap that last comment. Just put down your Diplomat smoking pipe and remove your monocle, listen to me for a second. How’s the future treating you? Flying cloud storage, you say? Electronic cigarettes with AI sentience? Well that all sounds absolutely pointless, but good luck to you. Gig economy for cultural history, is it? Because Elon Musk is now the Great Leader at more than a thousand years old and can’t afford to give any workers at all any rights because he needs to fund his great humanitarian expedition to carve a visible doge meme onto the surface of Jupiter? For the lols? You have to pay for your own monocle and pipe?? Yeah, yeah, that all sounds awful, but not much different from my time and I kinda wish you’d stop going on about it, it’s my turn to speak.

How are you currently gauging the cultural mood of the years 2020-21 out there in the year 3000? Sure, if you wanted an inspiring and comforting read on everything you could just go to Arlo Parks’s debut album. Perhaps if you wanted a glimpse into how humanity strived (and often succeeded) to make creative connections despite the viral barriers you could take a listen to Charli XCX’s magnificent ‘how i’m feeling now‘. Or, yeah, if you wanted to go all Pitchforky I guess you could name that Fiona Apple album. What’s that? You’re actually currently evaluating the era through the prism of Emily in Paris? Damn, that’s a good angle, and I’d love to see what horrors you’ve unearthed during your studies. But can I suggest something far more advantageous? How about you study the illuminating trilogy of albums released by Big $ilky over that period?

Continue reading “35 Big $ilky: Big $ilky vol.3”

Necessary Evil 2021 (60 – 51)

60 Justin Blackburn: Unlearning White America

Jesus Christ, people, Justin Blackburn, Justin fucking Blackburn.

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, is ‘Blackburn’ even a surname in America?? It’s such a dour, cold & windy, shovelling-cow-shit-into-a-tractor-just-outside-Durham, depressingly prosaic English name that it really doesn’t fit the glitzy imperialism and Hollywood gunplay of the US. It’s like finding out Shawn Michaels’s real second name is Hickenbottom. Has he ever even been to Blackburn? What are his opinions on Alan Shearer?

Secondly, was there a more arresting, more intentionally obnoxious, more on the nose outraged in 2021 than ‘Unlearning White America’? In the last decade?? You should certainly be able to gauge the general thesis of the record by its splenetic title, but I’m telling you now, you have no fucking idea. It’s important to note that Justin Blackburn is a white American himself, so rather than angrily tearing down the racist power structure that prevents perceived outsiders like himself from even a fair chance, he is on the inside (even more angrily) rejecting the inbuilt privileges that the people who grew up around him receive, refuse to acknowledge and even turn to resentment against the USA’s non white inhabitants. Many of the rage is directed toward Justin’s (diegetic? genuine?) father. All the rage is directed towards white America’s assumptions, inattentiveness and, yes, racism. Justin is so centred on the ridiculous state of race relations in his country that he even goes as far as to manage to make ‘Jesus’ rhyme with ‘racist’.

Continue reading “Necessary Evil 2021 (60 – 51)”

Necessary Evil 2021 (70 – 61)

70 Kings of Leon: When You See Yourself

(2016 #104, 2008 #17, 2007 #1!)

I’m allowed to still have Kings of Leon, right? You people will still consent to this? This is still OK, yeah? Nobody’s feeling mistreated in any way? I don’t want this to be one of those things where I was almost sure you were OK to me playing with my gross old man testicles while you watched holding back tears.

Remember that Simply Red song Holding Back the Tears? Well that’s what it was about. Mick Hucknall was so ahead of his time. He was trying to teach us, why did we refuse to learn? What’s that? It was actually called Holding Back the Years?? Well, shucks… Ah well, I’ve written it now.

I’ve done well, haven’t I? I’ve, like, mostly irradiated all the bullshit white guy rock that was honestly the entirety of all music I consumed before the age of about 19. I like to think that my end of year lists, while being a no way near exhaustive list of new music, is at least a forward thinking and progressive exercise in highlighting new and exciting progressions in style and presentation and in many different (and often new) genres. What’s your favourite Turmeric Trancotone album of 2021? Gotta be #26, right?

Continue reading “Necessary Evil 2021 (70 – 61)”

Necessary Evil 2020 pt 2 (90-81)

#90 Vritra: Sonar

OK, remember when I told you that there were so many fantastic records released this year? Well, that pretty much starts here, as Vritra’s

roughly 6’903rd record is yet another example of the unique and intoxicating talents of perhaps the least sufficiently appreciated (former??) member of Odd Future. If this is your first Vritra album, the rapping and musical styles one or two notches above clinically comatose will be sure to bewitch you for a solid half hour (do not listen to while operating heavy machinery etc), but the lack of real evolution of change of styles between records can mean a dangerous sense of disposability and lack of individual character can set in when you listen to multiple records. Like, the guy has released about three albums since that wonderful album with Wilma Archer last year that I didn’t even notice. Which, to be fair, is a docile forgetfulness that’s very on brand.

2019 (no.28)



#89 Lindsay Munroe: Our Heaviness

Continue reading “Necessary Evil 2020 pt 2 (90-81)”

A White Person Proves They’re Not Racist By Saying They’re Not Racist (and possibly by listing their black friends)

Shit’s really going down, ain’t it? You know shit’s going down because some big shops are shutting down. These shops didn’t shut down during a virus that’s currently been responsible for 376’000 deaths worldwide (watch this space!!), because, seriously, fuck these people, right? But now these multimillion dollar companies that have long built their success on the suffering and oppression of others are actually losing products on a scale absolutely insignificant to their wider wealth. So this shit’s important, yeah? COVID-19 testing centres are also being shut down in some areas because, well, some people don’t deserve to be safe, do they? In 2020, you really have to earn the right to not die, and we have to make it clear that certain people don’t deserve that right, yes?

I’m currently listening to a great album by Backxwash called ‘God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It‘. Real good record. Just thought I’d mention it. No reason.

Continue reading “A White Person Proves They’re Not Racist By Saying They’re Not Racist (and possibly by listing their black friends)”

Because I Like Stats (and That’s the Way It Is)

This is probably the only reason i still do this stupid fucking list that nobody reads and the one post that I actually enjoy writing (because it’s basically just me making lots of pretty pictures), statistical motherfucking analysis!! The numbers, the records and the science, yo! behind Necessary Evil 2019. Let’s start with with what (spit) other music journalists thought.

Metacritic Scores

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OK, we all actually agree on the nest album of the year, so the critics are actually correct for once. Chill out on Jamila Woods and Michael Kiwanuka though, yeah?

Continue reading “Because I Like Stats (and That’s the Way It Is)”

Necessary Evil 2019 (30-26)

30 Candy Says: You Are Beautiful, We Are All Beautiful v2

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If this blog has one true aim, then it’s to introduce and promote new…

Well… no, actually, if this blog has one true aim then it’s to extensively psychoanalyse myself and admit my private shame into what I believe to be essentially ‘The Void’, all under the laughable pretense of ‘reviewing music’. Ha! I haven’t done any ‘music reviews’ since I was highly scathing as a twelve/six year old of the 1996 Dodgy album ‘Free Peace Sweet‘. Three piece suite! Now I get it! Sorry, Dodgy, that review was unnecessarily harsh. Reappraisal: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

OK, but if this blog had a secondary aim, then it’s to introduce and promote new artists to…

No, the secondary aim is just an excuse to talk about Manic Street Preachers as much as possible, isn’t it? With ‘Official Prince Chat’ sprinkled on the side as garnish. I might just rename the blog to ‘Artists I Liked When I Was a Kid, At Length (While I Wait for the Next Hotelier Album)’. Dot WordPress dot com.

(…)

“If it had a third purpose it’d be […] no actually it’d be [BANTER]. In that case the fourth purpose would be […] actually, it’d probably be [STONE COLD MEGALOLZ]. But the fifth purpose would definitely be… (repeat)”

Continue reading “Necessary Evil 2019 (30-26)”

Necessary Evil 2019 (72-65)

72 Kanye West: Yandhi

yandhi-and-the-legacy-of-kanye-west-leaks

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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Continue reading “Necessary Evil 2019 (72-65)”