D CDs #479: From The Brain On Down

By all rights, Maggot Brain should just be about "Maggot Brain". A ten-minute opening title track? That level of stall-setting all too often suggests a band with only one real bullet in a clip otherwise filled with blanks.  And for sure, "Maggot Brain" is proper ordnance, a restrained soulful wah-wah freakout from guitarist Eddie Hazel that ultimately builds to the point where the already minimal backing realises what's going on and quite properly fades out.  It's glorious. It's Maggot Brain! What else could we fairly expect from an album but this?

Except that almost everything else here is phenomenal too.  "Can You Get To That" is pure, joyous funk, making the most of multiple vocalists and tight guitar to wring out every endorphin your grey matter possesses. I haven't sufficient experience with the genre to confidently assert that it wins funk forever, but surely it has to be in with a shot. The killer keys make "Hit It And Quit It" almost as good even before you factor in the riffs, which are hard and sharp as Wolverine's claws in an ice storm. By track four, Funkadelic has remembered that saxophones exist, and we are lost forever.

And if maybe - maybe - the album coasts for the next two tracks, it's only in the sense of working within a pattern so flawless that taking the foot off the accelerator is an action neither unearned nor damaging. "You like that", the disc asks, "Try some more of the same".  And we do, and it's all fine.

Besides, there's one last trick in the bag to break out, in the form of another ten-minute wig-out to cap the album. Cuckoo clocks, squeaky wheels and what mayor may not be a lawnmower engine appear to fill out a track few other bands could have called "Wars of Armageddon" and made it sound like understatement. It is quite simply sounds like nothing else I've ever heard; an end of the world in the sense that this was recorded on the last day the world didn't wake up with "Wars of Armageddon" existing. Many bands have plumped for the "kitchen sink thrown in by a drunken idiot" approach to an  LPs final track, but few have nailed the landing quite like this.

In short, it's phenomenal.  Seven tracks is a little on the light side - there are so many albums which would shine so much brighter if we were able to excise four or five of their least inspiring offerings - but with so much to enjoy here, and with the whole so aware of itself as a complete work, it seems ridiculous to bemoan the fact that they could have stuck some filler on here too.

Eight and half tentacles.

Sun And Sand

Episode 3 of Game of Thrones' fourth season contained an awful lot of scenes.  Exactly two of them have been discussed in any detail so far online. One because it did so much to further suspicions regarding who was responsible for last week's scene that everyone was talking about.  The other because... well, because it was hideous and gratuitous and spoiled everything.

So I guess I'm going to have to talk about those scenes. They are not, however, what I want to focus on.

(TV spoilers follow, book spoilers are mercifully absent.)

Initiquz Redux

Huh.  It's been eighteen months since the last music quiz on this 'ere blog.  Looking back at it, it was clearly too fiendishly difficult. As much as a calibration exercise as anything else, then, let's try something a little simpler.

Last time I gave you the initials of twenty five song titles (and their first word), along with the initials of their artists and albums.  This time I'll shake things up by a) giving you an idea of the number of missing letters, and b) linking all 24 songs.  There will be one point each for a song title, artist or album, another point for getting the first line correct (you don't need to give me all four for each song). The remaining four points goes to the first person to see the link.

As usual Google is permitted to check hunches and to get the exact wording of answers you already know.  Otherwise, keep off!

Here we go:

1. "They say that Richard Corey owns half of this whole town" - 'Richard Corey' - Simon and Garfunkel- Sounds Of Silence (Jamie)


2. "We stank O_ H___ D__ A__ A______" - 'D___ L_______ B____' - The Mountain Goats - The Sunset Tree (Jamie)

 
3."That's when Wendell Gee takes a tug upon the string" - 'Wendell Gee' - REM - Fables Of The Reconstruction (Jamie/Tara)

4. "You came I___ T__ P___- W___ A L___ B____ S____" - 'S_____ N__' - The Hold Steady - S_________ S_____ (Jamie)


5. "The cut-rate mime walking through the dirty streets" - 'Grace Kelly Blues' - Eels - Daisies Of The Galaxy (edenspresence)


6. "I never knew her name- 'Billy Davey's Daughter' - Stereophonics - Word Gets Around (Jamie)


7. "Doctor, what is happening to me?" - 'Just like Fred Astaire' - James - Millionaires (Fonz)

8. "Let's take T__ B___ O__ O_ T__ B__" - 'W____ C____' - Blink-182 - Enema Of The State (Jamie)


9. "Julie C______ T__ R_____ A__ T___" - T__ C________ - Yo La Tengo - E____ -O- P___ (Jamie)


10. "Out here in the fields I fight for my meals" - 'Baba O'Riley' - The Who - Who's Next (Fonz)


11. "This is F__ M_ B___" - 'F_____ K______' - R_____ - R______ I_ R______ B________

12. "Seymour Stein I've been lonely" - 'Seymour Stein' - Belle & Sebastian - The Boy With The Arab Strap (Jamie)


13. "Come A__ I__ T___ Y__ U____" - 'Hey, Johnny Park!' - Foo Fighters - The Color And The Shape (Jamie)

14. "Echoes O_ R_____ C_____ T______ M_ B______ W___" - 'R___ S___' - R_____ - ...A__ O__ C___ T__ W_____

15. "I was waiting for a cross-town train in the London underground when it struck me" - 'Clark Gable' - The Postal Service - Give Up (edenspresence)


16. "He's walking W____ I_ A_____ I D___ K___" - 'M______ C____' - M______ - K___ M_____

17. "I wish I H__ A S_____ P____" - 'S_____ P____' - R___ A____ - G___

18. "Goldenrod A__ T__ 4_ S____" - 'C______ P______ D__' - S_____ S______ - C___ O_ F___ T__ I________

19. "What would Brian Boitano do if he was here right now?" - 'What Would Brian Boitano Do?' - Trey Parker & Matt Stone - South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut Soundtrack (Fonz/Jamie)

20. "Whatever P______ I_ T___ B_____ W___ L____ M_ B_____ S___ A__ S____" - 'J___ L__ A__ A S______ A____' - B____ N__ - Y___ F_______ W_____

21. "Who sees the interiors like young Willem once did?" - 'Interiors (Song For Willem De Kooning)' - Manic Street Preachers - Everything Must Go (Tara)


22. "I drove F___ M________ T_ A_______" - 'S______ R_____' - D_____ J_____ - N__ T___ I_ I_ Y___ S_____

23. "Like M____ D____ I__ B___ S_____ B_ T__ C___" - 'M____ D____ A__ T__ C___' - T__ G_______ A_____ - T__ 5_ S____

24. "Is everybody happy now?" - 'Up All Night (Frankie Miller Goes To Hollywood)' - Counting Crows - Hard Candy (Fonz)

Link: full names in song titles (Fonz)

Things We Should've Learned From WE3

I utterly adore this article (h/t Jane Carnall).  Cats might be smarter than dogs, but no-one can tell because they're such colossal arseholes they defy analysis.

I know more than a few academics who have the same problem, of course. I wonder how many studies have been performed on them have had to be abandoned because the test subjects were just too unbearably prickish to allow the experiment to continue and/or immediately attempted to seize control of the experiment to further their own lunatic theories.

Cats and academics both make for terrible people.

(It's interesting that they've shown dogs understand finger-pointing, though.  None of the canids my parents have brought home have ever managed that.  Mind you, old English sheepdogs can be painfully obtuse animals, so our anecdotal evidence should be viewed with caution).

A Tale Of Cocktails #48

Easter Bunny

Ingredients

1 1/2 oz crème de cacao
1/2 oz vodka
1 teaspoon chocolate syrup
1 teaspoon cherry liqueur

Taste: 8
Look: 6  
Cost: 7
Name: 8
Prep: 7
Alcohol: 8
Overall: 7.3 

Preparation: Shake all ingredients over ice and pour.

General Comments: Well, this is rather tasty. The vodka is perhaps a little heavy in the mix, but the various chocolate flavours still come through easily, and the sweetness of the syrup offsets any sourness from the cherry liqueur.  Like all the best chocolate cocktails, this is almost as easy to imagine as a dessert sauce as a drink, though the fact this includes chocolate syrup renders that observation rather redundant.

But yeah, tasty drink.  I like the name as well, too, as it combines the two best elements of Easter; the pre-Christian celebration of spring (cherry blossoms) and the post-Christian celebration of far too much chocolate.

The Ghost Who Couldn't Believe In Herself

Well, that was all a bit underwhelming, wasn't it?

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For a while I was tempted to leave the post there.  I figured if I'm going to ape the impression the show instills, then that would the most appropriate response to the finale.  Let's at least do a little digging, though, and see if we can pinpoint where things went wrong.

(Spoilers follow, unsurprisingly.)

Really, I think it all comes down to a problem of scale. Not necessarily in the way you might think, though.  Given my clear love (at least, it's clear if you've wasted enough of your time here, or with me in general) of the Cthulhu Mythos, you would be forgiven for thinking the bug up my butt had a tentacled head and ate d6 investigators a round.

And that's not entirely incorrect, I suppose.  I'm not going to pretend I'm not disappointed to achieve my dream of seeing a high-quality Cthulhu TV series, or even a reworking of the Twin Peaks model of gradually gathering darkness and insanity growing from the shell of an apparently "normal" show.  But even leaving aside the technicality that the Yellow King and Carcosa are references that predate the works of HP Lovecraft (first appearing in the works of Robert W Chambers in the dying days of the nineteenth century), it became pretty clear after the halfway point of the season that this wasn't a show about dark forces abusing the young, so much as a show demonstrating that the abuse of the young is so horrifica and unspeakable that we've no need to drag supernatural forces into the issue.

Indeed, the final episode rather explicitly suggests that shrugging one's shoulders and blaming things on extra-dimensional horrors can blind you to what you need to see.  If the green-eared spaghetti monster had simply been some king of horror beyond space and time, there would have been no further need to consider it, and the link to fresh paint that finally cracked the case would never have been made. The amount of time this show spent in the mid '90s is rather fittin, actually, considering that this a leaf direct out of the Agent Scully playbook. It doesn't matter whether the evidence seems to suggest something conventionally inexplicable, you have to assume right up until the last possible moment that everything is operating within standard parameters. The deductive process is too important to unnecessarily contaminate with the assumption that it's all just magic, innit? This is a pretty close corollary to Cohle's insistence in the stupidity of assigning events to a divine being, as well as his own failings in generating entirely unprovable theories about the unbearable darkness of all existence.

So far so coherent, then. The problem here isn't the borrowing of the iconography of cosmic horror, but that of the conspiracy theory. For seven episodes we've been told about how no-one can be trusted, about the horrifying extent of the "sprawl" spread over who knows how many parishes and how many decades. A culture of indimidation so deep it can swallow sheriffs and inspire criminals to agonising suicide. A series of crimes so despicable they can drag a man into obsession, and persuade the guy whose wife he's shagged to join up.

Setting all that up and delivering one guy in a dilapidatted house before shrugging and saying "We were never going to get them all" seems tailor-made to be thoroughly unsatisfying - the word "trolling" has appeared in places. It's particularly frustrating given the show's interest elsewhere in demonstrating over-egging the pudding in a crime show is not merely unnecessary, but perhaps counter-productive.  The result is an ending which feels very much unlike the rest of the season, selling out the overall approach in exchange for a pat ending. Boo.

Ragweeds And Dandelions

Last week, I talked about the Lannisters never having had it so good as Season 4 opened. And of course much the same can be said of the Tyrells. But although they've ended up in almost as strong as position as their neighbours to the north-west, they've done it using radically different tactics.

(Major spoilers follow, though once again I'll steer clear of any book facts that take place after what we saw this week.)