Albums, Books, Movies, Things.

Howdy and welcome to another edition (or the first proper edition) of 'stuff that I have recently enjoyed'

For the last couple of years I've been meaning to read James Acaster's Perfect Sound Whatever, a book setting out why 2016 was the greatest year for music in history. I needed to start at the beginning of the year so that I can listen along with his one-album-a-day diet, and I managed to forget the last couple of Januaries. Let's go 2023! The album explanations (they're not really reviews, he deliberately doesn't give much personal input) are interspersed with Acaster's 2017, when he broke up with his girlfriend, was dropped by his agent, and ended up having a bit of a breakdown. The decision to restart this blog clearly has nothing to do with it.

And I reckon we'd be fast friends, to be honest. I know that everyone in the UK thinks that, but we'd get on really well. It's him, Colin Murray (I've already got my Fighting Talk episode all planned out), and Rylan. What a quartet we'd make.

And already PSW is helping to discover some great music, what comes next is effectively paraphrasing the book but still, hopefully there'll be some . Zeal & Ardor is the brainchild of Manuel Gagneux and 4chan. He used to ask the message board for genres to combine, and out of that came Z&A - a thought experiment based on what if American slaves had worshipped The Devil instead of Jesus. Their self-titled release from last year is particularly explosive. 40 Watt Sun went from writing one of 2011's best metal albums to atmospheric, brooding rock that almost tips toward folk. Unsurprisingly there was some discontentment among their existing fanbase, but sometimes we should fight our preconceptions.

Which brings me nicely to Emily Ratajkowski's series of essays that make up her critically acclaimed My Body. I didn't expect to find many parallels between Acaster and Ratajkowksi, but there are some between their absence of joy when it comes to success within their professional fields. Admittedly, Acaster's was exacerbated by other issues in his personal life and Ratajkowski's largely revolves around horrible people treating her horribly. I must admit, I was as guilty as some in the book when it comes to underestimating her, and I'm sorry for that.

One thing noticeably absent from my 2022 post are movies. At this point, it feels like it's been a few years since I've seriously invested time into films, instead mainly binge-watching almost endless TV crime dramas (and Gilmore Girls). So 2023 is going to be the year of the film (and book, and album, and football). Initially, I've been catching up with some releases from last year that I never got around to - and there are many. 

(There may be some spoilers below)

Good Luck To You, Leo Grande is almost entirely set in a single hotel room. Daryl McCormack (who was also great in Apple TV's Bad Sisters) plays a sex worker, and Emma Thompson the woman hiring him (Nancy). The film runs through some bog standard criticisms of sex work (Nancy worries that "Maybe you're an orphan") but also delves beneath those surface-level arguments. 

If anything the film tries to fit too much in, it turns out Leo was shunned by his mother after she walked in on him and some friends when he was younger - a fact discovered after Nancy effectively doxxes him because she was reading too much into their relationship. Ignoring personal boundaries is an interesting angle, but Grande shouldn't need a backstory to be angry at someone breaking his rules. 

At times it's hard not to hear Thompson's lines delivered by Sharon Horgan ("Sometimes I wonder whether what you young men need is a war") but equally, it's hard to imagine this not being Emma Thompson. Her bold decision to show her body is genuinely striking in a world where we so rarely see real bodies. And in the end, the film is about dropping the shame around sex and personal pleasure.

Almost the other end of the spectrum is The Menu. A critique of the mega-rich and also bad movie stars? A troupe of foodies descends on the renowned chef, Julian Slowik's (Ralph Fiennes) island and restaurant. The casting is excellent with fellow Brits Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Hoult being particular standouts. Hoult's character, Tyler, is a highlight given that he has prior knowledge of what happens on the island, and yet his behaviour doesn't seem to have been massively altered by it.

They brought in people who had worked on Chef's Table and that decision really does elevate things, with each dish being professionally staged in a way that wouldn't be out of place on Netflix. There were subtle changes from the initial script - the relationship between Tyler and his date in particular - and the film was stronger for it.

Next on the chopping block for me personally, Normal People (book) probably followed by Normal People (TV). And also to decide whether sitting through three hours of Babylon is going to be worth it.

The Year of Our Lord 2022

One of the problems with working from home over the last couple of years is the lack of a commute. Don't get me wrong, I hate commuting. It's tiring, you have to either cocoon yourself into a seat on the train or pay too much attention to the traffic in front of you. One thing it isn't (or isn't always) is wasted time. It's the only time in the week when I feel truly guilt-free for just reading a book, listening to an album, or telling whichever football podcast they don't know what they're talking about. Anyway, here's some stuff I liked from 2022.

I have not listened to nearly as many albums as I would have liked this year, but my rough list of favourites pic.twitter.com/8YGCfttNwb

— Matthew Williamson (@Photomattic) December 21, 2022

Over the years I've become far more receptive to the beauty of pop music. Two albums stick out on that journey from pretentious teen to now. Taylor Swift's 1989 and Carly Rae Jepsen's EMOTION. Both released new material last year, but neither quite lived up to the hype. Swift's Midnights tried to recapture some of the style of 1989 but didn't quite succeed. Meanwhile, CRJ's The Loneliest Time had some hits on it - Beach House and Talking to Yourself in particular - but largely passed by without incident.

One pop artist that's been on the playlist since Day dot is Lights. She slightly drifted off my radar after The Listening, but 2017's Skin & Earth, followed up by EPs with i_o and MYTH, put her very much back on it. PEP feels like the natural progression of her career so far. Singles Prodigal Daughter and Salt and Vinegar set the tone for an upbeat dance-adjacent album and, while that is largely the vibe, the closing track Grip is at odds with what came before and is all the better for it. A moody, building monster. Also, a quick shout-out for Okay, Okay, a track I largely glossed over on the first listen before catching it live and falling in love.

Then there are a couple of newcomers. I stumbled across Hatchie and her album Giving the World Away almost by accident when I saw Drift Records tweeting about their Dinked edition vinyl. Her introspective dream pop is a melancholic listening experience, she poses questions about almost every aspect of her existence but never seriously manages to resolve any. And my favourite pop album of the year was Rosalía's Motomami. Even the fact that it's Spanish doesn't seem to make it inaccessible. The switches between the traditional melodies and more contemporary beats keep things interesting, but it also doesn't detract from Rosalía's (occasionally) awesome vocals. There are some albums that feel like art (hi 22, A Million) and I'm filing this one amongst them.

But old habits die hard. The Wonder Years also decided to hark back to older sounds on The Hum Goes on Forever, though the lyrics have matured. Instead of singing about high school, Dan Campbell reflects on his newfound status as a parent. Similarly, you know what you're going to get with Toronto's PUP. THE UNRAVELLING OF PUPTHEBAND somehow contains a song written from the perspective of a computer finding love and makes it genuinely quite emotional.

My absolute favourite record comes from the mind of Nova Twins. Late each year I try to cram in as much as I've missed over the course of the year so my end-of-year list doesn't feel quite as sparse as it normally would be. That's how I found 2020's Who Are the Girls?, and Supernova just builds on where they were forced to pause during the pandemic. Whatever genre you want to attach to the duo, there's just no way to not enjoy a track like Fire & Ice. Part of the reason to attempt to write again is to give me the vocabulary to express what I like about albums like this, so maybe later in the year I'll be able to express it.

Nice to actually be able to do a book list too. Admittedly not a book list from 2022, but books read in said year. pic.twitter.com/5T7EjdCQuF

— Matthew Williamson (@Photomattic) December 22, 2022

Turns out that travelling over to Europe is quite a good time to read, and I managed to get Richard Powers' Bewilderment done in almost one sitting. Theo's wife had recently died, and his relationship with his neurodivergent son is explored throughout the book. The slightly lonely nature of travel probably combined with a lovely book, as it always has to do to properly resonate. There's beauty in their relationship, in the relationship between both of them and their missing third part, and in the World they end up trying to save.

Bewilderment may have been top overall, but the absolute best thing I read was The Garden of Forking Paths, the first half of Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges. The selection of surreal short stories interrogates everything from the structure of stories, to language, to dreams and manifestation. The Circular Ruins in particular is a magnificent piece of writing, quite possibly the best. I found Fictions (or Ficciones in Portuguese) via recommendations after reading Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, and it's clear why. Many of the same themes run through both men's work. The latter can be dense and hard to digest at points, but perfect for those who love the sort of conspiracy theorist mysteries popularised by Dan Brown (though with some added literary prestige).

Amazon have been giving away books for free for a few years now under their First Reads program, and one was Take What You Can Carry. A story surrounding an American woman, Olivia, who falls in love with Delan - from Kurdistan. The two travel to northern Iraq for a wedding within Delan's family, but Kurds are a persecuted people and Olivia stands out with her height and red hair. The story is based on Gian Sadar's own family which makes it all the more powerful.

In 2020 Michael Holding's speech about racism went viral. The next year he effectively curated a number of stories from elite sportspeople about their own experiences of racism. I'll be honest, I went in slightly sceptical about the power of the written word being able to maintain a similar power. Why We Kneel, How We Rise manages to keep the urgency while expanding beyond just Holding's personal experience.

I asked Meg to start buying me some 'award-winning fiction', I'd grown a little bit tired of mainly reading crime dramas, and she picked out The Colony by Audrey Magee. An English painter and French linguist travel to a remote Irish island, and the story investigates how they take advantage of the residents for their own end, and how those on the island react. The backdrop to everything is The Troubles, which start to bleed into the story as things progress.

I'll gloss over the frankly unhealthy number of Christmas films (the only films I really watched) during the year and just a quick final shout-out for the TV adaptation of One of Us Is Lying. I hate how much I love teen dramas, and it was the perfect binge-watch. I'm sad that the books didn't quite live up to it - though some of Karen McManus' twists are bonkers. 

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