Tag: writing

Necessary Evil 2025: The Ragin’ Climax

~ Lex Leeson ~ 1 Comment

The stage curtains open, revealing 40 lovely ladies in bathing suits, wearing sashes that denote which of 2025’s greatest albums they represent, blinding the front row with quite how dazzlingly white their full toothed grins are, in danger of taking someone’s fucking eye out with quite how resplendently squeezed tight their open cleavages are.

I come out through the floor on an elevating platform, full suit and bow tie, hair slicked back and microphone in my hand:

“There she iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis, Miss Necessary Eviiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiil…!”

“…and I said ‘Lady, that ain’t no gear stick!!!’ Seriously though, if you don’t let me videotape me pissing on you then I’ll eject you from the competition

Considering this will be the seventeenth time that I’ve collated the Scientifically Proven Best Albums of the Year™, I’m pretty sure I know what I’m doing by this point, yeah? I had only just graduated from university when I started writing this dumb list that nobody reads, and I’ll be freaking forty two when I finish the 2025 vintage! Considering my physical health (which, in 2025, has definitely started to take on a whole ‘end of days’ start of feel), it’s looking more and more likely that I will die before I ever retire this list. Mate, I would love to stop, this is a massive pain in the arse that ruins Christmas and my birthday for me every year. But if I go, then who seriously is there to take my place?? Pitchfork?? Give me a break. Fantano?? Bald fraud. Smash Hits??? Mate, I don’t like having to break this to you, but Smash Hits Magazine shut down in 2006. To quote a far less talented (but bizarrely more feted, which is often how it goes) personality who has been able to actually retire this year: I’m still here because you can’t do your job!

the last time ISN’T now

Staturday Night Fever: The Best Music of 2024 In Numbers

~ Lex Leeson ~ Leave a comment

Have I done that pun yet? Mate, I am struggling, honestly…

So here we are again, a round up of the hot stats of the best albums and songs of 2024, which I have bizarrely fallen into the habit of doing doing eleven fucking months after the Necessary Evil list of the best albums and songs of the year is actually published. Why do I always leave it this long? Because, quite simply, after writing 40+ blog posts and a gargantuan song list in little over a month, my brain seriously doesn’t want to even acknowledge the previous year’s music again for at least a thousand years.

I almost didn’t do it this year. But – but! – then I realised that 2025’s list might have some extremely notable points! So maybe I’ll retire this dumb fucking tradition once I get round to that in winter 2026. Until then? Yeah, we gotta do this.

I do like making these purdy pictures though…

Stats in the cradle and a silver spoon

Top 40 Prince Songs Recorded Between 23rd April 1985 and 31st March 1986

~ Lex Leeson ~ Leave a comment

The eighth Prince album ‘Parade’ was released in 1986. It has twelve songs on it. Is it any good? Mate, spoiler alert! You’ll find out if I think it’s a stinker when I list the 2025 Necessary Evil albums of the year!

Previously though, I have included tracks from Prince’s albums in my Legit Bosses countdowns of the best songs of the year. But that’s not really fair, is it? When He was listed as the joint best song of 2024 people were piiiiiiiiiiiissed!

So I’m going to give Prince His own dedicated countdown, at least in the near future, simply ranking all the songs that He recorded between His last album, 2024’s ‘Around the World in a Day‘, and 2025’s ‘Parade’. So, ranking ‘Parade’s twelve tracks, right?

Well… no… I could never settle on an exact number, but Prince recorded somewhere between 60 and 100 original songs in the eleven month period between the two albums. Eleven of them would appear on ‘Parade’; one would appear on His 1987 album ‘Sign ‘O’ the Times’; a handful would appear on future albums; some were given to protegees and other artists (including one that was famously taken the fuck back); and many are instrumental jams that were… maybe… never going to be released, but Prince was planning an instrumental jazz album at the time so it’s impossible to say.

We are now entering Prince’s most prolific period: in the next two or three years He would plan and then cancel at least four separate albums, countless side projects, a damn play, He would split up His band, start to question whether Warner Brothers were working in His best interests; and launch a near impossible to count number of failed protégées. It’s quite a ride.

Oh, and that 23rd April 1985 (when ‘Around the World in a Day’ was released) to 31st March 1985 (‘Parade’) timeline is occasionally loosely applied by a week or so (and, in one case, two fucking months). I’ve gone with the first recording of each song, as otherwise we have no idea (so, obviously, thanks a billion to https://princevault.com/.

Here’s the YouTube playlist, you lazy bastards.

This is what it’s like in the Dream Factory

Proper Journalist Kitty Aurora’s Emergency Review of the New Cam Cole Single

~ Lex Leeson ~ Leave a comment

[one more shot from The Oracle, who has written enough on this blog to have their own category on the site. They’ve long been a fervent believer in the music of Cam Cole, which you will have gathered from their review of the 2023 Freaks in a Field festival. However, Cam Cole’s new single was released a couple of days ago and Kitty HAS THINGS TO SAY]

I’ve loved Cam Cole for nearly 7 years. Since the days when his music sounded like it was clawing its way out of a dark alley at 2 a.m. Raw, ragged, alive, and impossibly human. I promoted every track, shouted from rooftops (not sorry for pissing off friends, family, neighbours, my kids). I annoyed everyone and embarrassed myself frequently. All part of being in the outer circle of the fan circus. I didn’t care; I’d get the tracks in people’s ears one way or another.

she’s what i want and I want her

#7 Young Jesus: The Fool

~ Lex Leeson ~ Leave a comment

God damn it…

Yeah, I was insanely sick the past couple of days. It started when a toothache started to really make itself very noticeable while I was writing my JPEGMAFIA piece on Thursday. I phoned up the emergency dentist and made an appointment for the next day, for the second time in the past ten days. “But Alex”, I hear you cry, “Why aren’t you registered to a regular dentist? Or why haven’t you even gone to the dentist in the previous decade??”. To which I reply: shut up, mum! Anyway, soon after I made that appointment, my toothache became unbearable. Paracetamols were no good, I’m apparently not supposed to take ibuprofen because of my ulcerative colitis, so I was running out of options. Until I remembered that I used to be prescribed codeine! I rooted through all my old medications until I found a pack, and then munched down about a thousand of them! This kinda sorted out my toothache, but at the same time fucked me over in every other sense. The next day, I could barely get out of bed, cancelled my Chinese class in the morning, and honestly tried to write this fucking post, but my head felt like all my brain synapses had been placed inside an oil drum that had been violently kicked off the top of the K2. The effort it took to exist yesterday was already unbearable, never mind write this dumb list that nobody reads.

Which is a shame, considering that this is the only album on the list so far that actually has a song on it written about me. No, honestly, it does. Yeah, I know that sounds crazy, but it’s not, don’t put in the paper that I got crazy.

Hala Yasser Hamed Al-Sinnwa

#25 John Grant: The Art of the Lie

~ Lex Leeson ~ 1 Comment

I’ve got the poise of a newborn giraffe
And I feel like I’ve fallen off the wagon
My moves are quite clearly unchoreographed
My comportment like that of a Komodo dragon

…

You deactivate my defense mechanisms
I think I’m coming unglued, I have emotional whiplash
I cannot brandish my trademark aloof cynicism
I’ve taken up macramé, just to deal with the backlash

Marbles

Oh, what’s that, Alan Sparhawk, you’ve done some experimentation on your new album? Played around with vocal and electronic effects? Crafted something different than what you’ve done previously and embraced a new sonic guise with your new record? That’s cute.

Layan Abd Al-Karim Asaad Al-Dahshan

10 yeule: softscars

~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

Soft scars on my skin, silicone, porcelain
I’m not one of them, love you ’til thе end
Give me onе more dose, turn me into a rose
Water me ’til I wither, 404 error

God created man, motherboard, wires and
Blood, bones, flesh, breathing, suicide engineering
Soft scars on my skin, silicone, porcelain
I’m not one of them, love you ’til the end

x w x

Oh my God! That’s it! Fuck you, Protomartyr, with your “kissing the ass of billionaires” nonsense, why should I listen to any of you? You’re all, like, a million years old. Nat Ćmiel, the Singaporean genius behind yeule, is in their mid twenties, they know what human beings’ attempted relationship with the online world is grasping at. Ćmiel knows that we’re not reaching out to praise a capitalistic God. They know that capitalism has already beaten any true beliefs out of us. Late stage capitalism has divided us, it has forced us into isolation, crushed anything approaching ‘community’ into tiny pieces of dust and demanded that those pieces of dust reach out to nobody, just become statistics and scrolling machines to tempt enough of the other specks of dust to pay their own subscriptions so they can wokescold you for buying a McDonalds, because you don’t really have the time nor money to do all you’re allowed to do to protest Israeli genocide. Of course, if we just came together and organised we could maybe make real roads towards overthrowing the imperialist system, making atrocities like the ones taking place in Israel, Yemen… Oh, never mind, you’re still writing a lengthy post complaining about Nat Ćmiel using they/them pronouns, aren’t you? We’re all on the same side, you egg sucking dog.

EXCUSE MY STATE, I’M AS HIGH AS YOUR HOPES

27 Sharon van Etten: Tramp

~ Lex Leeson ~ 5 Comments

Sharon? Imma get to you in a minute, OK?

This going to be one of those narcissistic overshares that I occasionally dip into, so if you’re not interested in that maybe just skip to the end. And then tell all your friends and family how disappointed you are and make sure they all too click on the article and don’t read it. And get them all to subscribe as well. It’s the only way I’ll learn. I also accept how it heavily features somebody else as a main character, and though I’m going to obscure identities and nobody reads this blog, there’s always a chance that it will get back to them and they will recognise the situation being written about and find it triggering or traumatic. If that happens, I’ll just fucking delete it, whatever, it’s not worth causing someone else that kind of grief. This isn’t a blanket policy by the way: my ex-wife asked me to take down a post I wrote in 2021 and it’s still there, and this post is going to be way softer than that! Oh, and I should probably mention that they’ll be no suicidal ideations in this post. Sorry to disappoint you.

So anyway, it started with a photo:

still makes me laugh…🤦
IN THE BACK OF THE NIGHTCLUB, SIPPIN’ CHAMPAGNE

36 Mitski: The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We

~ Lex Leeson ~ Leave a comment

I have a hope and though she’s blind with no name
She shits where she’s supposed to feed herself while I’m away
Sometimes I think it would be easier without her
But I know nothing can hurt me when I see her sleepin’ face

Buffalo Replaced

Fuck it, right, Mitski? Fuck it! Might as well scratch that old dog at least one more time.

It seemed like the “21st Century’s Poet Laureate Of Young Adulthood” was so done with this shit after last year’s ‘Laurel Hell’. That album was the soundtrack of “what capitalism’s churn and enforced responsibilities can do to a person, how art is far from safe from being depressingly commodified and incorporated into the machine”. The relative ‘success’ that they’d so far achieved had done nothing and had meant nothing, so what was even the fucking point? Oh! And the last album their record deal required! See you later, losers! Peeeeeeeeeeeeeace!

I FIND MYSELF IN A SHIT POSITION