Saturday 16 March 2024

D CDs #471: Nowt So Queer As Folk

This one was a bastard to write. I just don't get folk. 

Wait, no; that's not it.

I don't get my reactions to folk.

Part of this is the variance. The best folk is transcendent - a perfect alloy of history, politics and raw emotion so strong, you can fully believe what Woody Guthrie's guitar kept telling people. Bad folk is revanchist, ramshackle nonsense, endless self-indulgent variations of saying absolutely nothing. White people's jazz.

That the gap between best and worst can be measured in (bright) light years is true of every musical genre, naturally. What make folk unusual is how completely I can't get a handle on what makes the difference.

It's tempting to say a lot of it is just sticking "rock" on the end. In practice, though, that just seems to mean "a plug is involved". Which does help, yes, and it's vaguely amusing to me that it turns out I'd discounted the Newport Folk Festival hecklers as demonstrable fucking idiots years before knowing the details of who they were. That doesn't really get us anywhere, though; not when artists as diverse* as Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, and (as a protean form) the Beach Boys all got to claim the term.

I want to take I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight as a case study. See if it can get us to a unified theory of good folk. It seems pretty clearly in the upper tiers of the genre, after all. Perhaps we can establish a yardstick here, and use it to beat the fash-loving banjo botherers unaccountably allowed to get famous on folk’s farthing.

So: reasons …Lights Tonight folk rocks.

  • It knows the past was awful.

Nostalgia is a disease, and not one that only hurts those infected. Fuck folk that focuses its gaze at our great-grandfathers’ navels. …Bright Lights seems to make this mistake, on a surface reading, with “End Of The Rainbow” lamenting the state of today’s world, compared to his childhood. The point though is that the narrator is obviously pathetic, unable to distinguish his own problems from that of a newborn baby. Bad news for you between breast sessions, mate; your sister’s a whore. Try not to find that too hideous a revelation.

No. This album’s soul resides not with an imagined dead rainbow, but with the poor little beggar girl, forced to make her money briefly distracting the rich dickheads she holds in contempt. 

If there's a romance to the past here, it's only in the sense we all know it; we didn't always know just how difficult it is to get through the years.

Speaking of which...

  • It knows the present is awful.

Tossing coins to disabled beggars dancing in the street isn't something we see much of any more, but it's not like abasement to the rich as a survival mechanism has gone away.  Capitalism still us. all by inches, until it chooses to kill us outright. Fascism escaped its just garrotting by Guthrie's guitar strings. "Withered And Died" tackles this head on; we emerge butterfly-like from our teenage years, and like butterflies, we're all too easily crushed.

But there's hope here, too. It's a canny move to follow "Withered And Died" with "I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight". We switch gears from the misery of what life has taught us, to how we might be able to set it aside. Yes, a night on the town is a temporary solution, but they're all temporary solutions.

This tug-of-war between existential melancholy and finding hope in revelry is critical to the first half of the album. It's right there in the opening track; "When I Get To The Border" suggests that if you can't go down fighting, the next best thing is to go down drinking while on the run. If the album seems balanced between its twin concerns, well, just remember which song got to be the title track.

  • It’s clear-eyed about getting blurry-eyed.

Alcohol is a recurring concern of ...Lights Tonight, operating at various times as both an accompaniment to misery, and a way of warding it away. The narrator of the title track can't wait to enjoy "drunken nights rolling on the floor", while that of "...Border" tells the friends he's leaving behind that, when he eventually dies, they can basically assume it was drink that did it. 

Folk feels intimately connected with alcohol. Hang around any pub that prides itself on its collection of real ales (fake ales continuing to be one of the greatest crises Britain must face), and you run the constant risk someone will pull out a concealed mandolin, to fire crotchets at you without consent. I'm not sure what the link is between self-indulgent jam sessions, songs about hills, and people who get ludicrously snooty about their dipsomania, but it's definitely there.

...Lights Tonight touches on this as it closes out its first half. Once again, this is impeccable sequencing. "Down Where The Drunkards Roll" doesn't just round off the loose but undeniable thematic cohesion on Side A**. It follows directly from "...Lights Tonight" itself, showing us that song's narrator, and those like her, through the eyes of others. Kids looking grand until they get themselves fucked up. Lonely people who find comfort in the bottle because it eluded them everywhere else. People who crave the delusions drink delivers. There's no condemnation here, though. No simple desultory philippic, this. All we find is sympathy. An awareness of shared sadness; of wine that runs thicker than blood. They're all just temporary solutions. The lies come so easily because the truth is so terrible.

  • It doesn't outstay its welcome.

This is a zippy platter (certainly, it's far less self-indulgent than this essay). Ten songs in barely thirty-five minutes. There's a tightness here that counts for a lot; the sprawling cycles of irrelevant variation that mars so much self-indulgent folk is nowhere to be found. It doesn't hurt of course that, the one time the album feels like it's sliding into jamland, it's with the sublime melee of solos that carries the opening track into the distance. 

The slimness of it all also helps with the one real criticism worth making here: it's a pretty front-loaded disc. None of the offerings in its back half are actually bad - "The Little Beggar Girl" in particular cuts plenty deep enough. Still, there's a noticeable slackening of momentum past the halfway mark, as a determined march through hope and horror slows and stumbles. You can feel the album bleeding its last energy out as it topples to the dirt just beside the finish post.

Still, I could never get endings right either. And another way to say ...Lights Tonight collapses in the final seconds is to say it left everything out on England's green fields.

Surely that's the capstone of the structure holding all this together. Surely that's folk as fuck.

Seven and a half tentacles.


*Within the already established narrow ethnic corridor, that is.

** Only "Calvary Cross" feels somewhat out of place here, though this could well be at least partially related to the extremely strong association I have with that song.

Friday 1 March 2024

Friday 40K: A Banner Year

 Got round to finishing my Dark Angels Ancient. Behold: Old Steven.


Standard uber-simple paint job, this one, to fit in with the rest of the now 44-year old army. I did a bit of shading on the robes and seals, just because there's so much cloth and parchment that the miniature would look too flat otherwise.

Here's the bannerlad with my Captain and Company Champion. How he'll be slotted into the army structure is currently undetermined. Frankly, I'm struggling to be bothered, given how obnoxious the 10th Edition has been so far in terms of Firstborn marines. I was bang on in December when I predicted the incoming round of codexes would further buggerify my greenest boys. Deep-sixing some of the Firstborn datasheets was probably inevitable, and it's only my four servitors which are now completely unusable, with no "counts as" equivalent. It's the ludicrous restrictions on unit sizes and war gear that's pissed me off. Enforcing ten-men Tactical Squads already meant my Razorback could only carry a Devastator or Command Squad; now Command Squads have gone too, replaced by "Company Heroes" which aren't allowed in Razorbacks.

Even more bafflingly, Company Hero squads must include an Ancient and Company Champion (the latter of which cannot be fielded in any other way) plus exactly two veterans, one of which must have a heavy bolter.

I'm actually quite lucky, given all these ridiculous constraints. I can move the lascannon marine I used to have in my Command Squad to my nine-man squad, and swap my melta-gun veteran for a heavy bolter marine from a different squad. A quick paining session to add/remove the orange trim I use to denote veterans, and I'll have an army that's entirely useable aside from the servitors (and presuming no-one refuses to accept my Bikers as Outriders or Land Speeders as Storm Speeders). Honestly, though, I'm just struggling to justify even such minimal effort. It just feels like I'm going to be wasting more and more of my hobby time trying to rearrange my armies so they just about remain playable, rather than actually painting cool things that make me happy.

Bah.

Saturday 23 December 2023

Extended Trumpet Solo

Writing about totally failing to get much painting done recently made me realise I've been very remiss in keeping my legion of loyal readers updated on what I have been doing: writing about TV! Over the last three years I've been in three more Outside In books. I wrote short essays on the Millennium episode "Wide Open" and the Twin Peaks episode "Slaves And Masters", and went off-piste with a fictional academic article written by a smug fascist to cover "The Sontaran Experiment".

Next year, I'll be in the Deep Space Nine book with a piece on "Business As Usual", assuming Stacey likes the smell of whatever I cook up!

Friday 22 December 2023

Friday 40K: The Best I Can Do

The second half of this year has been absolutely miserable for painting, lads. I've averaged one miniature a month, all of them from my oldest two armies, meaning the colour schemes on them are extremely limited. Here, for the sake of contractual obligation, are two Dark Angels Tactical Marines.


Technically painted, I'm sure we can all agree. Fun fact, I only had these on my paint station because I needed them to make my army codex compliant for 9th Edition. By the time I'd finished them, we were on to 10th Ed, and a whole new set of ways in which what I have isn't fully usable. I've dutifully started a Dark Angels Ancient (current name: Old Steven), but I can't imagine being very far along with him at all before the new codex means another set of bullshit changes.

Also complete is the only unit I both started and finished this year: four bases of 'Nid Rippers.


So tiny! So bitey! They'll nom your world because there's, like, LOADS of them.

Two marines; twenty rippers. But which is best? There's only one way to tell! FIGHT!


(Ah, actually I'm being told you can also tell who's best through a series of "point scores" through which all models in Warhammer 40,000 can be compared. Ludicrous.)

Friday 8 December 2023

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.18 - "F.O.D. " (Green Day)



Ah, quiet/loud/quiet/loud. Where have we heard me talk about hearing that before?

I can’t claim I planned it, but the one-two quiet-loud pinch-punch of these last two songs makes for a nice sign off to a playlist defined by the border between misery and anger. It’s a long border, of course, covering a wide range of terrain. “The Quiet Things…” is a multilayered mapping of cross-currents and riptides, swirling just between the surface. “F.O.D” is a man telling his about-to-be-ex to fuck off and die.

There’s a power in simplicity – “F.O.D.” doesn’t even bother to go quiet again. The sheer broadness makes the song feel like it belongs to you alone, and does the same for everyone. The steps may have been different for all of us, but we’ve almost all seen a long, juddering dance lead us here. The last thread snaps, and you're left with only the layers of Sellotape and rows of safety pins you'd put in place to hold everything together. Just the outline of what used to be there.

When that happens, there’s nothing to do but take that last snapped strand, that final frayed straw, and burn it to ash in front of your new/old enemy’s face. You can’t even explain why this time was different; it just completely, obviously, is. You want a justification? Justifications are for the people I can still respect. Just fuck off and die

One thing that I love about this song is how the chord progression actually gets more complicated as the narrator lets his fury slip its mooring. The obvious thing to do would be to go the other way; to lose complexity along with composure. Inverting this makes it clear how much this guy has been holding back. How careful he’s been to present only a part of himself. It's not so much a switch as an expansion, hence the repetition of the need to destroy the bridge between them past hope of repair. Besides, we often repeat ourselves, when we're that angry. When someone has made us that angry. Just fuck off and die

I listened to "F.O.D." while driving across an actual bridge once, belting out the words to myself, the river, and the night. I remember that every time I hear this song, even though I don’t remember which bridge it was, or which river. I can't even remember the car. The association remains, but not what lay on the other side of it. Just the outline of what used to be there. 

I can’t remember whose face was in my mind I as I sang along, either. Who was it I had so completely had enough of their daring to be in my life? Who was I so desperate to have gone, hat the memory of my exhausted, burning rage has so outlasted the name of whomever I'd directed it towards?

Just the outline of what used to be there. Just fuck off and DIE.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2: Louder Now

B-Side:


I don't like to go negative with my music posts, but you just gotta stand back and marvel at how completely this cover misses the point of the original song, on every conceivable level.

Wednesday 6 September 2023

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.17 - "The Quiet Things That No-one Ever Knows " (Brand New)

Ah, quiet/loud/quiet/loud. Where have we heard that before?

Brand New were an interesting band more than they were an enjoyable one. Or at least, they were after their delightfully unselfconscious debut Your Favorite Weapon. Twelve tracks of charismatic emo so strong, it felt like a capstone for the whole damn musical movement. Or maybe a gravestone is the better metaphor. Brand New had dealt a slow-bleeding but ultimately mortal wound, inflicted ironically yet surgically by a band being feted as the big (brand) new thing. So this is how emo dies; to thunderous applause. 

But when you've mounted the summit of the terrain you're exploring, there's nowhere (brand) new to go, except down. Not in terms of quality; in terms of geography. Deja Entendu goes subterranean, almost daring the listener to enjoy its dark, stagnant pools and echoing darkness. "Charismatic" was now entirely off the table.

The band's masterstroke was to pair this quest for the deepest recesses of their genre and their psyches with an attempt to find a (brand) new spin on the first post-fame album. If standard emo can be summed up as "You WILL recognise my pain!", Deja Entendu explores the pain of being recognised. The fear of it is a central theme, too, whether it be at the hands of a para-social fanbase ("I Will Play My Game Beneath The Spin Light"), a burned lover ("The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot"), or your own horrified conscience (the previously-covered "Me Vs Maradona Vs Elvis").

"The Quiet Things That No-One Ever Knows" is the central chamber in the cave system Brand New carved out here, with their teeth and nails and bile. The croon/yell formula is repurposed to brilliant effect, pressed into a parallel of the calm exterior of a man desperate to tell the truth to his partner, but knowing doing so will torpedo the relationship beyond hope of it staying afloat. "I lie for you, and I lie well". He knows they're doomed - indeed, he knows sooner or later she'll figure out he's been cheating on her - but he can't bring himself to pull the trigger. Their love is dying, but he doesn't want it to die just yet. He looks out at the glory of the Pacific, and all he can think about is the hospitals. The places we delay the inevitable.

Mixed in with all this is the stress of touring - so much sacrificed for the sake of empty hotels. "If today's the day it get's tired/today's the day we drop out". Sure, mate. His partner isn't the only one he's lying to. Which of course means he's even lying about who he's lying to. Meta-mendacity.

When this song dropped as the first single from the album, there were people who complained its traditional structure - quiet/loud/quiet/loud, where have we heard that before? - was a poor advertisement for the desperate sandpaper leers and expansive hollow dankness of the parent album. That after trying so hard to be brand new, Brand New had let themselves down here.

This was and is bullshit. "The Quiet Things..." was the final cut, the coup de grace for an entire genre they'd left bleeding on the floor. Having slammed the door, they came back to burn the building. You can't head somewhere (brand) new until you've left some other place behind, and the whole fucking point of the elevator into Hell is that it starts at the top (listen to that guitar shifting downward as we head into each verse; these lads knew what they were doing).

Where the elevator ended up is a tale for another time. All that matters here is the soundtrack on the way down. 

You'd struggle to do any better than this.


B-side

Bonus B-side (ignore the shaky first couple lines)

Tuesday 29 August 2023

Five Things I Learned In British Columbia

1. Both Victoria and (especially) Vancouver feel very European as cities, compared to Anchorage, Winnipeg, and Churchill, which are more what forty-three years of consuming US/Canadian film and television suggested I should expect. If it weren't for the accents and the signs warning me not to feed coyotes, I'm not sure I would have been able to tell I wasn't in an English-speaking city east of the Atlantic.

I felt right at home, is what I'm saying, at least until I tried to scratch an itch for a decent cider, something Canada does not appear to possess.

2. Humpback whales! They're HUGE! They're elusive! They get under your boat and you think "OH SHIT I don't think we'll win if this turns into a wrestling match"! Seeing them out in the Pacific, I had no trouble at all understanding why Star Trek felt comfortable basing an entire film on the conceit that an alien species would travel dozens of light-years just to check in on these fifty-ton krillbois.


(All my pictures are rubbish, sorry. Have some of a buncha extremely stinky sea-lions in consolation.)



3. The Museum of Vancouver is well worth a trip. I'd wanted to visit the Anthropology Museum, actually, but it was shut for earthquake-proofing (another of those rare reminders of just how far from home I was). The colonial era of Vancouver is well-represented, nicely honest about the city's racist past, and clear-eyed about how its labour history is marred by rabid anti-Communism. In order to get to that section, though, you have to go through three large rooms dedicated to the First Nations peoples who own the land Vancouver stands on (having never ceded it). The result, delightfully, is to turn the entire history of the city of Vancouver into an afterthought, a bitter coda to the true story of the land. 

There's a lot here; artefacts, testimonials from today's First Nations communities. The highlight of an extremely strong experience though is the film Mia, which you can see here, and I cannot recommend enough. Just the soundtrack alone gives me the shivers - it feels like the music Angelo Badalamenti was reaching for his entire life.

4. Totem poles are not the cross-continental Native American practice I'd naively believed (I blame Asterix And The Great Crossing). They're a tradition among the peoples of the Pacific northwest, used to tell stories and mark historic events. Victoria is home to the tallest totem pole in the world; presented here with an F for scale.


5. Best food in Vancouver: Sablefish. Also called black cod and butterfish, the former because it tastes like cod (despite hailing from a different order), and the latter because it's so high in fat content, it tastes like its been fried in butter even when it hasn't. You can get it in the UK, for about three times the price of true cod. I haven't yet felt that I can justify the expense, but a couple of times I've come close.

Worst food in Vancouver: Dutch salted liquorice. If the Flying Dutchman were real, this "sweet" would perfectly replicate the taste and texture of the undead captain's curs'd ring-piece. 

Honorable mention: poutine, which, like pizza, varies tremendously in quality but is almost impossible to get completely wrong.