2024 This Fluid Thrill Music Awards

The awards:

• top ten albums released in 2024 (with honourable mentions)
• top song released in 2024 (with honourable mention)
• best artists discovered in 2024 that have been around a long time

I've done this (or something similar) many times previously: 2023, 2022, 2021 albums and songs, 2020, 2019, 2018 albums and songs, 2017 albums and songs, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.

Here's a playlist to listen along to selections from the prizewinners in 2024...

Top ten* albums of 2024

White Roses, My God by Alan Sparhawk

I'm not usually a fan of ultra-processed vocals. Nor of solo albums where the artist is trying so hard to make an aural break from previous bands (in this case: the majestic Low, the raucous Retribution Gospel Choir and funky Derecho Rhythm Section). 

But Alan Sparhawk, my God. 

And while I'm a massive fan of Low (seeing them live at Bodega in 2016 is probably a top five gig), I wasn't so high on the glitchy, electronic sound of Double Negative (2018) and HEY WHAT (2021), so to take that glitchy, electronic angle and turn it up to 11... 

But Alan Sparhawk, my God.

Of course, after the death of your life partner and band mate (Mimi Parker) you want to obliterate old selves. But to forge something so listenable from such angular parts? The best grief-stricken record since Hummingbird? 

Whether you come to this record from a rock, slow-core, hip hop or electronica background, chances are it'll speak to you.

My God, Alan. Bless you.

Lived Here for a While by Good Looks

Album opener 'If it's gone' might have been my song of the year, if top ten albums didn't render themselves ineligible. Tracks like 'Self-destructor', 'White Out', and 'Can You See Me Tonight?' aren't far behind. But repeated listens allows slower tunes to rise up. 'Broken Body' is about disability, childhood and regret. 'Why Don't You Believe Me?' about a mother-son relationship where it's the son's turn to let the side down. 

These guys are from Austin, Texas, but sound (to me, at least) Australian. In researching their origins I learnt about the disastrous lead-in to this album. 

The day after they released their 2022 debut, the clairvoyantly titled Bummer Year, guitarist Jake Ames was nearly killed in a hit-and-run. After a long recovery, the band got back and they road, only for their van to catch fire and destroy all their gear, instruments, laptops, and merch. 

Lived Here for a While is infused with the knowledge of how bad things can get, but also the joy of not being done just yet.

Big Swimmer by King Hannah

The first track I heard from this Liverpudlian duo was 'New York, Let's Do Nothing', a talk-sung indie track in the vein of Dry Cleaning Cassandra Jenkins, Wet Leg, The Weather Station, Bongwater, Life Without Buildings, Young Marble Giants (and, of course, the Velvet Underground)... 

So of course I loved that song, but King Hannah has other modes. 

The title track is a big, seventies style ballad, replete with backing vocals from Sharon Van Etten (who reappears later in the album). 'Suddenly, Your Hand' sounds like Courtney Barnett in her calmer moments. 'Somewhere near El Paso' is more of a noise-rock jam in the vein of Sonic Youth or Swans. 'Davey Says' is straight-ahead garage pop-rock. Elsewhere, there's moments of Bill Callahan's chugging guitar and ironic vocals. Other artists, like Slint and John Prine are name-checked directly.

And yes, I like the fact that Hannah Merrick talks to/mentions her guitarist Craig Whittle in her anecdotes. 

He first me five years later

Said that Craig and I worked too well together

(New York, Let's Do Nothing)

Craig and I have been

Craig and I have been

Watching quite disturbing

Documentaries in the evenings

(Suddenly, Your Hand)

More songs should talk to Craigs. We're good people.

My Light, My Destroyer by Cassandra Jenkins

Speaking of Cassandra Jenkins, she's followed up her big hit (for a talkie indie track in the age of streaming) 'Hard Drive' from the 2021 album An Overview of Phenomenal Nature, with a more diverse, more musical, more confident collection of tracks. 

The field recordings and found samples are still part of the mix, but Jenkins puts herself front and centre from the opener. 'Devotion'. Her delicate, reedy voice then morphs into a kind of Sheryl Crow/Natalie Hemby clone suitable for fronting a country-infected, rock-driven album standout. It's gutsy while also still being whispery. 'Petco' and 'Only One' are similarly poppy (though in different ways), helping to balance out the more experimental and ambient tracks.

Lighthouse by Francis of Delirium 

Is this the greatest band from Luxembourg ever? Even ignoring the bonus points they scored for calling a song 'Cliffs', I think it is.

They play big songs about big feelings. Every time I listen to the album I think I have a different favourite track: today, it's 'First Touch'... 'Cliffs' being ineligible due to a conflict of interest. Actually, now it's 'Blue Tuesday' (take that, New Order). Or maybe it's 'Ballet Dancers (Never Love Again)? 

(Parenthesis ftw!)

Tigers Blood by Waxahatchee

I felt like I'd placed other Waxahatchee albums in my top ten before, but searching this site suggest the closest Katie Crutchfield came was an honorable mention for Ivy Trip back in 2015. 

Well, this here album feels like the apotheosis of what Waxahatchee has been building towards. It's sooo confident. The vocals are so far forward in the mix. The choruses are the kind you can lose your voice to. The rhythm section is gruntier. We've moved from barbeque playlist to spring cleaning with your headphones on.

The duet with MJ Lenderman, 'Right Back To It', is the greatest duet since... ('Islands in the Stream' is all I can think of right now... Karaoke brain)... And Lenderman provides backing on some other tracks, but this is all Crutchfield.

Manning Fireworks by MJ Lenderman

I've put this album lower in my ranking than my gut wants me to, because a) I wanted to give Waxahatchee some non-reflected glory, b) Boat Songs made my top ten in 2022 and c) I'm excited about seeing Lenderman with full band live in March next year, so I'm not a reliable witness. 

Where Boat Songs felt very influenced by Jason Molina, Manning Fireworks has more of a Neil Young vibe (not just because there's a 10 minute song called 'Bark at the Moon').

There's still the sharp as a Stanley knife lyricism ('Please don't ask how I'm doing / draining cum from hotel showers / hoping for the hours to pass a little faster'), but now it's matched musically. And songs like 'She's Leaving You' show Lenderman can tone down the lyrical audacity and just deliver a SONG.

In Lieu of Flowers by Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties

Sometimes an album comes along that teaches you how to appreciate a genre you never really "got". So it is with In Lieu of Flowers which sent me down an emo (or emo-Americana) wormhole in 2024, but Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties remained pre-eminent.

I love the conceit. Dan Campbell, frontman of The Wonder Years, writes songs from the perspective of fictional frontman, Aaron West: a character study conducted through music.

I've written elsewhere how compelling I find artists who admit the charade while still performing it (see: Lana Del Rey, Dave Wyndorf). On the face of it, it seems harder to do this in a genre like emo where so much of its power supposedly derives from the baring of raw emotion and the punk-inherited conceit of having no conceit, than pop or heavy metal.

But it works.

The album opens with the sound of barroom chatter. "Aaron West" starts singing along with an acoustic guitar and the chatter continues as West ramps up the volume of his vocals, until the two-minute-thirty mark where its as if the E-Street band has burst on stage and it's like sunrise in a My Morning Jacket song or a profession of undying love in a Dolly Parton song... Like: spine-tingling. Like: levitational. Like: "How did this make me feel this?"

In the narrative of the song (and the wider fiction of the Roaring Twenties), West is suddenly joined on stage by his estranged bandmates ('The burst of applause, a sudden eruption / Catherine nods in my direction, I turn my head / and outta nothing there's the band"). 

Though this is the third Aaron West album, I got chills starting just with this song.

I missed you motherfuckers bad

Over again and over again and over again

I missed you motherfuckers bad

Dude, you had me at "sudden eruption".

Rebuild Report by Hockey Dad

Okay, these guys sound Australian and are Australian (despite band name giving Canadian vibes). 

Exhibit A: 'Wreck & Ruin' (can't believe this hasn't been released as a single)

If they sound happier and more naïve than Good Looks, that's understandable. Far from wishing van fires or traffic accidents on these lads from Wollongong, I hope they stay upbeat and pop-inflected for ever.

*Update: 17 January 2025

Originally I only had nine top albums because there was a natural break between the above and the next tier. But maybe I also subconsciously knew I was forgetting about this next album, which I listened to many times but for some reason hadn't filed away in my Best Albums of the year playlist, and thus didn't include in my ratings spreadsheet and omitted from the original post...

Lustre by The Buoys

Not the first all-female Australian band to make my top ten, and won't be the last. The band name works no matter if you pronounce it correctly (a homophone with 'boys' = ironic) or Americanly (boo-eys - which to American ears should still bring to mind buoyancy). 

The lyrics are sardonic and largely relationship focussed, the sound is often peppy, not a million miles away from the Beths. The formula works best when they colour outside the lines a little, like the grimier sound (thrumming baseline and distorted chorus chant) in 'Check Mate', the alternating wordy and simple parts of 'Holding On', or the airier, band-in-an-empty-amphitheatre sound of 'Ahead of Myself'.

Honourable Mentions: Albums

Best of the rest from 2024

• Pedro The Lion - Santa Cruz
• Hamish Hawk - A Firmer Hand
• ILDES - Tangk
• Friko - Where we've been, where we go from here
• Everything Everything - Mountainhead
• Quivers - Oyster Cuts

Best from 2023 I flubbed on (and all three would deserve a top ten spot if not for chronology)

• Margaret Glaspy - Echo The Diamond
• Arborist - An Endless Sequence of Dead Zeroes
• Gord Downie - Lustre Parfait (not sure I can ever live the shame down of missing this when it came out) - and while I'm at it, I also missed and liked Paul Langlois Band's Guess What.

Okay, now it's time for...

Best song of 2024

'Lagunita' by Lizzie No

This song starts like a runaway delivery truck. The lead guitar peel reminds me of Rob Baker from the Tragically Hip. The verse takes things down a notch to match No's careful, lightly country-fried vocals, then accelerates again for the chorus. The song proceeds as great songs do, familiar yet fresh, loud yet crystalline. The third verse acts as a bridge, and features what I think is a güiro. 

It's just perfectly put together.

You just want to listen to it again as soon as it finishes. So you do, and find the güiro is there in the first verse as well. New layers keep emerging.

The lyrics gain weight each time. 

"The angel I wrestled in darkness / he's pulling his socks on / withholding my blessing". 

"Tell me you care for me, tell me a secret that you've half forgotten / Thieving and dying in the arms of love."

"And I’ve learned to love the sinner and the sin / See the brush in the painting, taste the calf in the gelatin."

Sometimes you don't need nonsense syllables to make a gem.

(NB: While this song was released as a single in late 2023, it appears on an album released in 2024, which is where I discovered it, so it totally counts based on my own made-up criteria).

A close second: 

Drunk by Maggie Rogers

Similar to 'Lagunita', but even louder & more breakneck. 

Best "new" old artist:

Radney Foster

Follow me down the rabbit hole (as I remember it). I listened to Toad the Wet Sprocket do a cover of REM's 'Driver 8', which I then couldn't find online, but discovered its a heavily covered song and listened to lots of other covers, which got me listening to Hootie and the Blowfish's covers record Scattered, Smothered and Covered (2000), which opens with 'Fine Line' which became my newest earworm, so then I looked up who did the original, and it was Radney Foster from his 1992 album Del Rio, TX 1959. 

Whew. 

Foster's original clears the Hootie cover (which feels rushed and breathless). But it may not be the best song on Del Rio... that's probably 'Nobody Wins' (which has 69x more plays on Spotify). Both are superbly crafted country rock songs. 

The way the fine line between right and wrong in the first line of the chorus of 'Fine Line' moves from metaphor to geography in the next ("He's been crossing over that border way too long" - earlier we learn our married trucker has another woman "down in Georgia").

Or the profusion of rhymes in the pre-chorus (used/truce) and chorus (lose/bruised/fuse). 

Foster is great at building engines to make human beings sing.

Digging deeper into his discography gets a little weird, with the nostalgia for a bygone America implied in his debut album's title doubled down on with songs like 'Texas in 1880' when he was part of the duo Foster and Lloyd (unfortunately, it's another banger).

Honourable mention: Richard Buckner

I think Buckner's track 'Loaded at the Wrong Door -Acoustic' from the Deluxe Reissue of his 2002 album, Impasse, must've made it onto an automated Spotify playlist somehow. Weird that it would be this bonus track, which has fewer listens than the album track, but it's a) better and b) still my favourite Buckner song after going back through all his stuff.

It's oddly structured, oblique. His singing is not objectively good. But it does have feeling. It worms its way into your head and your soul. I mumble-hum this song A LOT in the shower. (I can also recommend 'The Ocean Cliff Clearing' from 1998's Since).

Is it possible for an artist to be 100% vibe?

These days he performs concerts in people's living rooms, which is kind of perfect for how to consume his music: so close and personal it's both awkward and euphoric.

Now to see how much it'll cost to get him to Dunedin...

Nailing Down the Saint: The Playlist

So I wrote another novel and it comes out tomorrow in Aotearoa New Zealand. It’s called Nailing Down the Saint and it’s about Hollywood, fatherhood and levitation. Here’s 70 minutes of music of special relevance to the project, and a bunch of words about that music (and other things).

1.     Patient Zero – Aimee Mann

If Nailing Down the Saint was Season Two of a TV show[1], this song that might play over the “Previously, on” recap: A young man arrives in Hollywood. The world lays at his feet. But things don’t go as planned.

There’s this point, two and half minutes into the song, just after Mann sings, “You paid your respects like a ransom / To a moment that was doomed from the start”, and there’s this low, ominous piano note. The song continues, but that note once struck can’t be unstruck. Things have turned to shit, even if you aren’t ready to admit it yet.

Welcome to Duncan Blake’s life in LA.

Bonus points for levitation and VFX references.

2.     Bedtime – Gord Downie

This song, the 3^rd track on Introduce Yerself, kicked me in the guts so friggin’ hard when I first heard it, still reeling from Downie’s death[2], knowing he wrote it as his days with his family were numbered, and have young kids myself. The song recounts the struggle to get a young child to sleep, laying them down, pulling your hands away,  “as if from a bomb”, and getting out of the room, only to be called back in and for it to “start all over again”.

In the midst of this routine, it can seem a trial. Interminable. But what goes unsaid here is this eminently and imminently mortal father would give anything to go through it again. What might sound like a lullaby to someone not paying attention is actually an ode to fatherhood and a goodbye.

In NDTS, the protagonist, Duncan, has a nearly four-year-old son, Zeb, and thoughts of time passing and not being there for Zeb fuck him up. If he heard ‘Bedtime’, he’d be reduced to a puddle of gloop like *that*.

3.     Tinseltown in the Rain – The Blue Nile

So Duncan has moved to LA to continue his meteoric rise in the world of filmmaking, but was fucked over, then fucked up by fatherhood, and finds himself working in a chain restaurant in West Hollywood.

The penultimate chapter of the first section lifts its title directly from The Blue Nile’s song. With its synth-heavy, questioning mood – “Why did we ever come so far? / I knew I'd seen it all before / Do I love you ? Yes I love you / Will we always be happy go lucky?” – it feels like the mopey section of a John Hughes movie, which is absolutely something Duncan Blake might think in the moment before he gets his second chance handed to him by Frank Motta.

4.     Horizon – Aldous Harding

These next three songs are dedicated to Felicity “Mack” MacKinnon, Duncan’s best friend from high school, who, after a period of estrangement, joins him on his Italian quest to scout locations for Frank Motta’s biopic of Saint Joseph of Copertino (more on him in a bit).

When I first heard this song in 2017, I thought: that’s Mack. Here’s something I’d already written about her (and that’s in the final novel):

‘Come on, babe, play nice.’ She’d called him ‘babe’ since forever. Had shown up at his high school calling everyone that, like some Hollywood producer posing as a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, only she seemed to be doing it ironically. As if she’d ever turn Hollywood! She was real, belonged to the world of cellulite, not celluloid, could bend old language around new corners. It was as if every ‘babe’ had an implied, parenthetical retort, like the title of an unlikely pop hit.

(You’re no picture yourself) Babe.

(Nothing you can do can get to me) Babe.

Harding’s spare-yet-epic, totally cinematic masterpiece is likewise riddled with complex, terminal “babes”.

5.     It’s Alright (Baby’s Coming Back) – Eurythmics

The only thing is: Aldous Harding is more Duncan’s kind of music than Mack’s.

On the road trip, she’s the master of the in-car playlist, leaning much more toward the nostalgic (or what counts as nostalgia for a child of the 80’s and 90’s).

There was A LOT more banter about music while Duncan and Mack travelled around Italy in the first draft of NDTS, but this had to (HAD TO!!) be pared back. Examples of riffs that ended on the cutting room floor: how OK Computer-era Radiohead sounds like a piss-take of 90’s po-faced seriousness; on nostalgia and wistfulness; how Lennox and Stewart are a better songwriting duo than Lennon and McCartney… That’s not a hill I’m willing to die on, but I will sit at the summit until some vinyl-smelling boor comes to chase me off.

6.     I Will Wait – Hootie & the Blowfish

One thing I couldn’t cut was Mack and Duncan arguing about this song.

I was very much in Duncan’s camp (i.e. it is unconscionable to enjoy, yet alone publicly endorse Hootie & the Blowfish) for most of my life[3]. But I’m now Team Mack on this particular track. Add it twice to your next road trip playlist: once to get over the hump of your fellow travellers’ prejudice and a second time for the singalong.

7.     Can’t Keep Checking My Phone – Unknown Mortal Orchestra

I saw UMO live in Wellington in December 2015, when progress on the novel was stymied. I’d written about 10,000 words the year before, then got very sick for a fortnight and couldn’t get clear of family and work commitments to get the ball rolling again. But I could still faff around on my phone and go to concerts and have transcendent experiences listening to Ruban Neilson do Prince via T-Rex through one of those tin-can-and-string telephone getups.

When I got back into NDTS the next year, UMO’s Multi Love was still on high rotate and Duncan’s cellphone became one of the major characters – a know-it-all who sucks the mystery out of tipsy wonderings but can’t help get you out of the tangle it has led you into in the medieval centre of Assisi.

Then there’s Duncan’s female friend from work in LA who’s What’s App-ing him, desperate to know how his road trip is going…

8.     Sitting in my Hotel – The Kinks

‘Celluloid Heroes’ might be the more obvious Kinks song here, but that song sucks.

This one, however, is up there with ‘Sweet Lady Genevieve’ as the underappreciated Kinks masterpiece.

It has that classic, fame-is-a-downer vibe that can translate even when you’re not famous (which is, let’s face it, most of us), just simply alone in a hotel room, or, right next to your best friend in a room in Pietrarubbaia and you realise that you’ve been criminally incurious about her life and motivations.

9.     A Private Understanding – Protomartyr

The best track from my favourite album of 2017 (Relatives in Descent), the most important year in the creation of NDTS.[4]

You can read a lot of things into the lyrics, so of course I see connections with my novel, but in 2018 I learnt another thing I love about Protomartyr while preparing to see them live[5]: that the frontman, Joe Casey, didn’t join a band until he was 35 (my age at the time), couldn’t play an instrument (like me, despite those three terms of classical guitar tuition at Intermediate) and struggled with stage-fright (hence the dark glasses and static stage presence). There’s even a Tumblr dedicated to journalist’s overwrought descriptions of him.

And yet here he is, singing songs about the Flint water crisis, the plague of toxic masculinity and the mysterious hum that can be heard in Windsor, Ontario.

A hero for our times!

10.  My Body – David Bazan

This was my favourite song of 2018. If 2017 was all about the first draft, 2018 was about actually writing an ending (!) and rolling through the manuscript again and again until it was fit for someone else to read (the editing process took me through to mid-2019).

Bazan solo and in all his other projects is amazing. Everything is shot through with the anxiety that comes as another mediocre (or not) white dude with a microphone.

‘My Body’ speaks directly to the concerns of NDTS.

Honestly, pick any line.

Or just start from the beginning: “This feels like a disproportionate amount of longing / More confirmation I was never meant to live alone”

(I mean, who write lyrics like that?)

As Duncan gets further and further into his location scouting gig, his native scepticism about the feats of Saint Joseph of Copertino, a seventeenth century Franciscan friar who is purported to have levitated hundreds of times and performed countless other miracles during and after his time on earth, is eaten away. To the point he might admit, as Bazan does in his chorus: “My body doesn’t believe what my mind believes”. Might.

11.  Mind Games – John Lennon

I’d never really listened to, or thought about, the lyrics here until I was writing this book. I’d just assumed it was about the mind games two people in a relationship play, but it’s a much more positive type of mind game Lennon is talking about – inspired by the book Mind Games: The Guide to Inner Space by Robert Masters and Jean Houston – and totally in keeping with Lennon in 1973.

For a while I wanted to call the novel Absolute Elsewhere, after a lyric in this song[6]. Instead it’s just a chapter title (along with another lyric, ‘Out of the Now’) and I let someone in sweatpants mangle it on guitar to a pizzeria full of cult members.

12.  Strange Torpedo – Lucy Dacus

Another chapter title.

Dacus has explained that she was inspired by a line in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but I still can’t avoid the phallic associations of a ‘strange torpedo on the loose’ – which fits in with the theme of Hollywood enabling the unchecked masculine gaze…

Having said that. the strange torpedo in NDTS is a dead blackbird a young girl is trying to bring back to life in a convent carpark.

13.  Stay Lost (acoustic) / Tinseltown Swimming in Blood – Destroyer

This double shot from the deluxe edition of Destroyer’s Ken (2017) rounds out the Italian portion of the novel. Not gonna divulge any spoilers, but from the song titles themselves you can begin to surmise how things round out for Duncan with Mack and Motta.

14.  The French Inhaler – Warren Zevon

Early in the novel, there’s a discussion of Frank Motta’s oeuvre, including a film called French Inhaler, about “the ultimate kiss-off song [i.e. Zevon’s]. A cross between a talking heads documentary and crime scene re-enactment.”[7]

Thematically, this track and the way it crosses the line for both misogyny and self-loathing fits much better at the tail end of this playlist and the moment for Duncan “when the lights came up at two”.

15.  Mariners Apartment Complex – Lana Del Rey

16.  Green Light – Lorde

It’s important to finish this playlist with some younger, female voices for reasons that will be apparent to anyone who gets to the end of NDTS.

I’ve long been a sucker for the overtness of Del Rey’s façade and the performativeness of her songs, but ‘Mariners Apartment Complex’ appears to mark a more personal turn in her song writing. When she sings, ‘I’m your man’, in the chorus, it’s about self-empowerment and reclaiming gendered language and everything you want to surround your kids – female, male or otherwise - with.

Then there’s Lorde.

Melodrama came out in 2017 and was on high rotate as I wrote NDTS. But I was also in the US in 2013 when ‘Royals’ started to blow up (and Ellie Catton won the Booker Prize) and it was this amazing moment for young Kiwi women and I was struggling to start something new after my novel, The Mannequin Makers, had come out and would struggle for another four years…

So when Lorde kicked off her sophomore album with ‘Green Light’, a perfectly complex dancefloor jam about almost having the licence to just let go, it struck a chord with this thirty-something, who, like Duncan Blake, had “skin the colour of old lace, a penis and a second chance.”

---

[1] It’s not – it’s a standalone novel – but if it was…

[2] If you get to the end of NDTS, or if you’re like me and you read the acknowledgements page first, you’ll see that I dedicate the book to the memory of Gord Downie, the Canadian musician, writer and humanitarian best known as the frontman of The Tragically Hip. Downie recorded his final solo album, Introduce Yerself, while in the late stage of his battle with brain cancer. It was released 10 days after his death in October 2017, when I was in the midst of writing the first draft of NDTS. I’d been a rabid fan of The Hip and Downie’s solo work for more than a decade, and had shared a brief email exchange with him in the early 2010s which included me sending him my first book, but it felt to personal, too chummy, to have the dedication open the book. So that’s why it’s tucked away in back.

[3] I once flatted with a person who was inconsiderate, untidy and morally bogus (she expected us to lie to her husband when he called), but at the time I thought our most emblematic exchange was when, the one time she actually decided to clean the kitchen, she was blaring an FM station and said to me, “I just love Hootie and the Goldfish, don’t you?”

[4] The formula is pretty simple if you wanna pander to my tastes: dark, brooding music with evocative yet unpindownable lyrics = fantastic music to listen to while writing = dozens of streams.

[5] It was a great show BTW.

[6] Bullet dodged.

[7] One of the cool things about creating multiple filmographies was coming up with movies I wish someone would make. I mean, this craze for basic pop biopics baffles me when there’s so many more interesting stories to be told. Listen to ‘The French Inhaler’ and then Loudon Wainwright III’s ‘Hollywood Hopeful’ and tell me these songs haven’t just conjured up 90 minutes of screen time you’d actually leave the house for.

May Consumption Diary

MUSIC


May is the month I finally got a feel for 2019 musically, from amazing albums from Aldous Harding and Orville Peck, to the fact my four year old wants to listen to 'Old Town Road' on repeat...

MAILBOX #1

Advance copy of my next book, arrived 30 May 2019
(Anyone who asks why the book is dedicated to Gord Downie clearly has clearly never read this blog)

BOOKS


There There by Tommy Orange (novel, audiobook)

Wow. I loved this.

I was a bit apprehensive when the novel began with a long, direct address about the lives of urban Native Americans, particularly those in Oakland, and how they got there. I was thinking: Where can this go from here?

And then Orange begins to introduce a large cast of characters, each with chapters from their own perspective. Weird comparison, but it felt a bit like George R.R. Martin at the helm of another exploding narrative (albeit in a mix of first and third person).

So I was still like: How's he gonna land this plane?

And he fucking does!

There's so much heart in here it's easy to overlook the head required to corral so many moving parts.


The New Ships by Kate Duignan (novel, NZ)

Oh my god, I finished a physical book. And a NZ novel, to boot!

I really enjoyed this. It was dense in a good way. Not at the sentence level - at all - but the way there's all these time periods layered, geologically, and at various points we dig through from one time to another.

One observation: I kept forgetting I was reading a first person narrator. Peter Collie is so in check, in the beginning at least, despite the recent death of his wife, that it feels like a third person coolly narrating the story. I found this distance, ironically, pulled me in. What's up with this dude? Turns out, if you dig, plenty.


An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira (novel)


What? Two physical books in a month? Well, I did fly for work a little more than normal. And this one is only 87 pages.

Aira is an interesting writer. Whatever number of books I say here, he'll have published more than that by the time you read it. Wikipedia doesn't even try, listing only a "Partial Biography", comprising 73 novels published since 1975, and a bunch of other shorter works.

Is this a novel or a novella? It's unlike any novella I've ever read. It's so dense and direct. After reading Carl Shuker's A Mistake a couple of months ago, which is 182 pages, I've been thinking a lot about how to get in and get out in less than 200 pages. Aira has me lowering that page limit.

There's a particular kind of story that suits the level of compression and focus required to make it feel bigger than a short story but not leave you wanting more. The title of Aira's 2000 novel, translated by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions in 2006, tells you a lot about how this one works.

One thing that slim books can get away with: getting better upon re-reading.

Which is ironic as Aira claims never to go back and edit his work. That's how he can churn out three books a year, a superhuman feat regardless of length. The complete lack of editing is surely posturing. The way he leaves the date he finished the manuscript on the last page! But I certainly felt the forward momentum he claims comes, for him, only by laying sentence after sentence in an indelible sequence.


Artful by Ali Smith (fiction/non-fiction hybrid, audiobook)

So, I thought I was going to listen to four lectures Smith delivered at Oxford, now read by the author herself in audiobook form - and this was true. But those lectures took such an inventive form that once can only refer to the resulting book as a hybrid of fiction and non-fiction.

Artful served to reinforce a couple of things.

Like: shit, Ali Smith is a good writer.

And: I could never do that! I don't think it's meant as an intellectual flex, but the connections she draws across literatures (albeit predominantly European) is impressive, and then to do it within a frame narration that is heart-breaking?

Damn.


The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff (non-fiction, audiobook)

I'm only halfway through. I had to stop as this book was making me overthink a lot of things.

There's plenty to agree with here. Call-out culture isn't something we'll look back on and say: that's where things started getting good. It makes me anxious even saying anything about call-out culture.

But there was an underlying tone in this book. The glee it felt in focussing on left-wing examples of violence and hypocrisy and blinkeredness and general badness. I couldn't stop thinking about Trump's "on both sides".

So I hit pause and I'll try finish it next month. Because muting isn't the solution when dealing with confronting ideas and material.

MAILBOX #2

I ordered a quilt and nailed it to the wall of my garage.
Time will tell if this is the start of my Tragically Hip shrine.

FILM & TV

Game of Thrones, seasons 4, 5, 6 (continuing the our rewatch) and eps 3-6 (& The Last Watch) of Season 8

My reckons, briefly: the final season was rushed. It would have been so much better if it was stretched into 10 episodes. There were at least 10 good episode-ending beats. A little bit of extra time for the big events to breathe. No need for any more CGI or crowd scenes: just people talking in rooms or on ramparts. You know, the show's bread and butter until the checkbook was opened too far.

Back when the show behaved liked TV, with all it's budgetary limitations and workarounds (see all of Rob Stark's off-screen battles in the early seasons), there was nothing but time. But it morphed into a full-blown fantasy-action epic with cinematic budget (and the echoes to Peter Jackson's Rings films got more and more pronounced), while still obeying something resembling a TV schedule. 6+ hours of content delivered over a 2 year period? No wonder everyone involved, from the makeup artists to the showrunners, wanted the dream to end. The fact 2 of those 6 hours were effectively action sequences (battles of Winterfell and Kings Landing): that's a lot of time and cost and effort that simply wasn't part of the formula when Thrones was building its fanbase.

So effectively four hours to explain everything that had built up over almost 70 hours previously? Ouch.

And then there's the expectations of the audience.

A lot of people were watching the show wrong (ha!). The death pools that people ran at the start of the season, as if that's the most interesting part: seeing characters die. Some people were only there for the cinematics. For the CGI dragons and the army of the dead. And then they have the gaul to join the chorus of people criticising the scripting and execution?

If you set aside the fact things were incredibly rushed, did any of the major plot points come without heavy foreshadowing? What Arya achieves in episode 3 was built up for seven seasons! (I concede her "leap" was poorly shot and did this plot point no favours.) Daenerys' heel turn: did y'all not watch the first half of Battle of the Bastards? And all of that Jon being Jon. The thing that becomes apparent when rewatching the show was how shit of a military commander Jon is, how frequently others bail him out (Stannis, the Knights of the Vale, Arya, Drogon) and how he'll never fully exercise his agency.

Season Six was when the show well and truly left the books behind and rewatching it in tandem with the last couple of episodes of Season 8 demonstrated the showrunners were working really hard to get to their ending. But a lot of people's reactions reflect the fact it was 2.5 years since season six aired and people just don't have good enough memories.

Small, non-spoilery example: two of my friends mentioned they didn't remember who Edmure Tully was when he stood up and started to pitch himself as the next king in the final episode, despite him being prominent in the siege of Riverrun late in Season Six (and his earlier significance leading up to the Red Wedding). So that whole 'Sit down Uncle' bit made them shrug.

Endings are hard. Game of Thrones had it worse than most: a thousand strands to pull together, a rep for subverting expectations, millions of fans that rage from rabid to extremely casual but everyone feeling entitled to express their opinion in real time (and in an age when social status can be accrued through denunciation without debate), and doing so at double speed.

But to say the final season should be handed to someone else and reshot? Every one of the signatories for that petition should be forced to make their own piece of art, a short story or film or script for a single episode of TV, and then reflect on their right to demand greater satisfaction from the labour and creativity of others.

Barry, Seasons 1 and 2

Having said something about GoT, I feel I should say something about this quite different HBO show. I also watching in May.

Season 1 didn't wow me until late in the piece, but with 30 minute episodes and 8 episode seasons, I was able to power through quickly and become hooked.

NoHo Hank is one of the better characters in TV history and it will be interesting to see how the show balances the need to give us our Hank fix without imbalancing things too much.

I love that the show feels so free to take risks, like the whole supernatural Taekwondo 12 year old in Season 2, or the way the inspecting officers don't stick around long. There's a bit of Thrones (at least, what GRRM wrote) in this ruthlessness.

Bumping Mics, Season 1

Isle of Dogs (watched in April, I think, but I left it off that list because it was... regrettably forgettable)