Hey Violet FROM THE OUTSIDE (2017)

Top 5 song of 2017, as if Avril and Ashlee Simpson's squalid era had birthed a Venus from the scallop shell. The gf hoodie menace if real. Steph still has stolen and hidden my favorite, and I married the dang girl!  The album has some other fun tunes, bringing pop-punk sensibilities to a few different genres and pulling them off with the goofy sense of humor that was always people's favorite part of that genre's first-wave.



Anyhow, I'm rooting for them to break through and be as big as they want to be, because they're a tight band that know how to write a song---this album is >> better than whatever Bruce+Meatloaf spritzer we're about to get from the Killers, and I wish a freaky Friday could swap their audience sizes.

Youth Bandits

When Steph is out of town for more than 24 hours, things get dire and I resort to singing myself theme songs from youth.

Neil Young HITCHHIKER (2017)

Ditch-adjacent, nocturnal and resigned to a fallen earth we made fell, not some garden with poorly-placed fruit trees, just natural frailty and greed summing and summing to larger burdens on this earnest, tender heart barely left beating in a collapsing cathedral of bone.

Not supplanting any of his impeccable run from '69-'75, but complementary, for a seamless cloth of doom folk ahead of its time. RIYL Live at Massey Hall or Live at the Cellar Door.

2017 FALL MOVIE PREVIEW WITH SCOTT AND JULIE

Julie is a podcast natural and this was a delight.

Satoshi Ashikawa STILL WAY (WAVE NOTATION 2) (1982)

"So what kind of music do you like, Ben?"
*deep breath*
"Right now it has been mostly Japanese minimalism and West Coast Jazz.  No one's more sorry than I am."

THE HANDMAID'S TALE S1 (2017)

The front half was a lot stronger than the back--I think they are cutting the supply with a bit too much baking soda--but it is a truly intense experience of a show.  I saw the criticism on Twitter that it's a little "One Perfect Shot-y" and that is definitely true, but at least they're aiming for the brass ring and occasionally fall flat off their carousel horse. The soundtrack is also pretty amateur hour, and Joseph Fiennes and Yvonne Strahovski aren't able to salvage their underwritten, over-explained architects of the patriarchy. But Alexis Bledel, Samira Wiley, and especially Elisabeth Moss are all fierce as hell, and they're worth the price of admission, each showing her own balance of desperation and dignity in an impossible situation.

Hiroshi Yoshimura FOUR POSTCARDS (2004)

Hang in there. Can you imagine how refreshing the future could be, when we're free of all this?

AMERICANS GODS S1 (2017)

We slogged through this out of loyalty and affection for the book, and disbelief that it could have yielded such a terrible adaptation.  But despite the charm of Ian McShane and the try-hard effort from Ricky Whittle, this thing was DOA and somehow got worse with each passing episode.

Imagine, if you will, a middle-schooler raised in a basement on only Tim Burton and Zach Snyder, then given complete control over a TV show with the caveat being that it must be infinitely long, despite the brevity of the source material.  Voilà!   

Hiroshi Yoshimura MUSIC FOR NINE POST CARDS (1982)

There are some truly stupendous youTube uploaders doing the hero's work of sharing foreign and out-of-print works. This particular album will be reissued this fall, but why wait if you don't have to? I'd attempt to lure you into a listen, but the host described it better than I could: small spaces with warm notes.

NOBODY MOVE Denis Johnson (2009)

Johnson brings a little extra literature to the high brow humor-noir of Elmore Leonard, and delivers two indelible couples, locked in a California cat-and-mouse game. His mastery of elevating the scrubby life of losers and outsiders to both mythic and hilarious is a straight analogue to the music of John Darnielle and Craig Finn. Sometimes you have to suffer a life of bad breaks and torn tickets to get the girl and finally find some fiber.

BLOOD MERIDIAN: OR THE EVENING REDNESS IN THE WEST Cormac McCarthy (1985)

The film rights have been bought and traded and forgot.  They, probably rightly, call it unfilmmable.  It really helped to read this post-Westworld, because so many of the visuals for the dark, Mexican-Apache hinterland of the park seem to have drawn inspiration from this horror novel masquerading as a Western.  Based on the true story of a despicable gang of scalp-hunting American mercenaries, it reads like an Irish epic poem as inspired by the gospel of Judas. The language is gorgeously peaty, like Seamus Heaney narrating The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  It is an unpleasant, gut-wrenching experience, like Crime and Punishment but tortuously longer and more graphic in the agony of living without civilization, at the mercy of the unmerciful. The rewarding part is meta-textual--having been raised on the simple morality of the Westerns of the 40's through 80's, whether Silverado, Tombstone, Gunsmoke, or any number of John Wayne films, to fully explore the logical conclusions of an unlawful world, where the white-hats aren't coming...it is oddly satisfying to contemplate the worst case scenario, and this is it.