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dustedmagazine · 2 years

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Dust Volume 8, Number 8

A few of us have been struggling with life lately—illness, job turmoil, elderly parents, money problems—so we’ve been, perhaps, a bit less prolific than usual. This Dust is the shortest one in a while, but let’s not let brevity be a turn-off. Here are polished vault raps, acoustic guitar blues, classic jazz, ear-busting metal, African desert dreams, indie pop and nouveau grunge records, mostly enjoyed, mostly recommended by Jennifer Kelly, Patrick Masterson, Bill Meyer, Jonathan Shaw and Justin Cober-Lake.

03 Greedo and Mike Free — “Drop Down (Feat. KenTheMan)” (Alamo)

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The best we can hope for is that 03 Greedo gets out in 2023 on good behavior, but the man born Jason Jamal Jackson isn’t thinking about shortcutting his 20-year sentence stuck in a Texas prison like that. In the space where you thought 2018’s God Level would be a coup de grâce and his legacy forever relegated to jail phone freestyles and unfinished Instagram snippets, Greedo — or the people he’s entrusted to be him in the meantime, anyway — has found ways to keep his name in the game via a steady stream of projects (including Kenny Beats and Travis Barker collaborations) that will shortly include fellow Angelino Mike Free, DJ Mustard acolyte and co-producer of Tyga’s “Rack City,” among others. “Drop Down,” which also features the flavor of Northside Houston rapper Ken TheMan, is one of those earworms that self-evidently shows why the streets still scream the new album’s title. Say it loud, say it proud: Free 03.

Patrick Masterson

Botch — “One Twenty Two” (Sargent House)

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And there etched into Tacoma’s forest timber read the words last touched in 2002: Set apart, great divides… but as with so much else culturally two decades later, not so great that mathcore luminaries Botch couldn’t reunite for this one-off born out of quarantine frustrations and snowballing what ifs. It’d be a mistake to look at this as anything more than impermanent, a glimpse through a keyhole of another world full of satisfying returns and flooding nostalgia, but anyone old enough to recognize the significance of “One Twenty Two” should appreciate it for existing at all. It’s a little slower, a little lurchier than you might expect from the Washington quartet, but Dave Verellen’s scorched vocals retain their power and the energy is there. Some days you wonder why it is you keep waking up to an orb falling apart; some days you get an answer back from the cosmos urging you not to throw in the towel just yet. It’s good to have them back for a fleeting moment, anyway.

Patrick Masterson

D.C. Cross — Hot-Wire the Lay-Low: Australian Escapist Pieces for Guitar (Self-Release)

Hot-wire the Lay-low (Australian escapist pieces for guitar) by D.C Cross

D.C. Cross has a lilting, breezy way with the acoustic blues guitar, his tunes unspooling with a lightfingered (and light-footed) grace. It’s fitting then that he wrote those songs during an itinerant year crisscrossing New South Wales during the second year of COVID. The place names, then, are a little different from the usual—Cootamundra and South Albury instead of Memphis or St. Louis—but sound will resonate with fans of Jack Rose, William Tyler and Glenn Jones. These are traveling songs in love with motion. “Stolen Police Car Down the Great Western Highway” has a fluid, onward rushing bravado, its flurries and forays of picking offered in service of a wide-horizon groove. “At Night Those Mountains Disappear” turns ruminative, leaving space for introspection as the dusk falls. Cross didn’t stay for long in any single place, but he let the essence of each locality seep into himself and his music. “Birthday Dread” is maybe the loveliest of a lovely bunch, its quick bursts of picking erupting out of serene melody, just touched with melody. The crossroads has always held a place in the way we imagine the blues, but no one which crossroads, did they?

Jennifer Kelly

Miles Davis Quintet — Live Europe 1960 Revisited (Ezz-thetics)

It’s possible to assess this album without hearing it. If you’re a more than casual fan of the Miles Davis-John Coltrane partnership, you probably already have this music, either on Volume 6 of the Legacy Bootleg Series or on actual bootlegs. And if you’ve been paying attention he last few years, you probably already have taken a position on the Ezz-thetics label’s practice of taking post-bop and free jazz masterpieces from the mid-20th century, repackaging them with new art, new annotation (respect to Dusted’s Derek Taylor for his work on this volume), reorganized track listings, and giving the sound the most presence-enhancing buff that the 21st century can currently provide.

But what’s the fun in not listening? This music, taken from the beginning and the end of the tour that would put a full stop on that epic alliance, is a torch lit by aesthetic tension and blazing with the diverse passions that fired said tensions. Miles, abetted by most of his band, was going into a slick phase, presenting his modal ideas in streamlined fashion. And Coltrane was ready to take that concept as deep as it could go. They were both right, but no stage could contain their contradictions for long. Framed by versions of “So What,” played at a pace similar to the original on Kind Of Blue, this five-track collection distills the tour’s drama quite irresistibly.

Bill Meyer

Grotesqueries — Haunted Mausoleum (Caligari Records)

Haunted Mausoleum by GROTESQUERIES

Nuthin fancy, folks — just 17 minutes of rip-snortin’ Metal ov Death, with one ear on the Swedish old school and another on early British speed metal’s tough and dirty tonality. That’s an appealing combination, and Grotesqueries are clearly having a good time with it, in spite of their songs’ titles: “Flesh Prison” sounds like a long night with bad gas, “Gortician” sounds like an obscure species of squash (until you catch the pun). And so on. Drummer Yianni Tranxidis is the band’s principal force and provides the gruesome aesthetic vision, and this reviewer has to note that his skills with beating the skins outstrip his banal, horror-culture-derived enthusiasms for gross-out violence and human depredations. If you can put up with the exhausted and “evil” themes, the songs are fast, thumping and vicious. Check out the opening minute of “Gortician,” which shifts gears a few times without losing its headlong quality or the layer of fetid ditchwater that covers it. Pretty stinky, dudes. More, please.

Jonathan Shaw

Hellrazor — Heaven’s Gate

Heaven's Gate by Hellrazor

Given how important they seemed at the time, it’s a little puzzling how few bands really sound like Nirvana. Hardly anyone gets the alchemy that Cobain & co. worked with the combination of careening, unhinged but tuneful melodies, noise-blistered guitars and assaultive bass and drums, though the constituent parts are everywhere. But here’s one. Hellrazor the nouveau grunge outfit led by Michael Falcone (drummer for Speedy Ortiz and Ovlov, but here on guitar) gets a lot of that wild, manic-depressive sweetness, that obliterating guitar force right. Heaven’s Gate is the band’s second full-length, after a raft of singles, EPs and cassettes stretching back to about 2016, and it is fuzzily, annihilatingly glorious, i.e., it smells a lot like teen spirit. The best cuts are the super-heavy, feedback bending “Landscaper,” which swaggers like a giant metallic beast, and “Jello Stars” which runs MBV’s guitar blurs into shimmering walls of noise-y mayhem, then parts the curtains for slack shoegaze-y song-ful-ness. There are some goofy spoken word bits bracketing the music, but the songs speak for themselves from the Sonic Youth-riffed (and appropriately named) “Big Buzz” to the Roboto-funked, cartoon voiced “All the Candy in the World.”

Jennifer Kelly

Jones Jones — Just Justice (ESP-Disk’)

Just Justice by Jones Jones

The search engine-stymying name of this trio obscures, among other things, the formidable proliferation of instrumental skill and improvisational understanding gathered under its banner. Bassist Mark Dresser (Anthony Braxton Quartet, Trio M,), sopranino / tenor saxophonist Larry Ochs (ROVA Saxophone Quartet, Maybe Monday, Spectral), and drummer Vladimir Tarasov (Ganelin Trio, Moscow Coposers Orchestra) each pull together the full package an individual sound, an encyclopedic grasp of past musical advances, and a capacity to tune into the moment’s action. They also possess a decade and a half of collaboration, which assures that what you hear on their fourth album isn’t just the sum of their sounds, but an integrated ensemble concept in which microscopic details enhance evolving sonic narratives. This is music that wears its heaviness lightly.

Bill Meyer

Rokia Koné & Jackknife Lee—BAMANAN (Real World)

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Rokia Koné sings with a little sand in the corners, her burnished Malian blues runs scratched up, just a little with a hitch here, a rasp there, so that she sounds both unearthly and very real. Koné once backed up Angelique Kidjo in Les Amazone D’Afrique, and vocally, she shares some of that legendary tribe’s strength. BAMANAN, recorded remotely during the COVID year, pairs her with Jackknife Lee, an Irish producer now living in California, known for shaping the work of U2, Taylor Swift, the Killers and R.E.M. The two never shared physical space while recording this album. Given the two principals, it not surprising that contrast and contradiction is built in. Koné has an elemental, soulful presence; Lee specializes in the sheen and aura of big-time arena pop. So in “Bi Ye Tulonba Ye” the singer calls out lines that could have been written before the industrial age, that would sound perfectly comfortable echoing over miles of empty dunes, while Lee frames her in a shimmering, surreal bed of synths that could have come from The Joshua Tree. The songs vary in their mix of indie pop and afro-blues with “N’yanyan” coming closest to a western-style quiet storm ballad, and “Anw Tile (It’s Our Time)” sounding most undilutedly Malian. “Kurunba” is the club banger with infra-red blasts of synth bass and intricate patterns of hand drums, and an exhilarating communal call and response between Koné and her singers. Lee makes every sound reverberate, especially the drums, which have that Phil Collins-esque, gate-reverbed, realer-than-real punch, creating an uncanny valley for this powerful vocalist to preside over.

Jennifer Kelly

Man Made Hill — Mirage Repair (Orange Milk)

Mirage Repair by Man Made Hill

Unsuspecting listeners, prepare yourselves for a hefty helping of petri dish funk, a sonic concoction as infectious as bacteria, but far less gross. Pop miscreant Randy Gagne – the man behind such bizarre tunes as “Hot 4 Sloth” and “My Accoutrements” – is back with another collection of ectoplasm-flecked ditties. The Hamilton, Ontario-based one-man purveyor of retro-futuristic sleaze is determined to reel you in with his phantasmagoric take on R&B, dance, and lounge music. If this all strikes you as insane, don’t be scared. Gagne has an enticing sense of charisma, so it's best to give in. What you’ll find beneath the faux-sordid exterior is an altruistic family man raised on televised wrestling, Full Moon Entertainment VHS tapes, and other cultural oddities. He's a noise musician with a quirky sense of humor, who’s always had a soft spot for pop music. A freak coincidence brought Gagne into the orbit of Jeremy Greenspan (Junior Boys), and Mirage Repair is the result. The producer gives Man Made Hill’s freaky funk a glistening wax job, polishing away the possibility for any rough edges. Give it a listen and you’ll have Gagne’s earworms penetrating your grey matter for weeks to come. Imagine the stares you’ll get when you sing lines like “take a look at what I brought from the plasma zone / every time you go / you take a piece of meat with you” to yourself in the subway. Doesn’t that image make you smile?

Bryon Hayes

Mystic Charm — Hell Did Freeze Over (Personal Records)

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Amsterdam’s Mystic Charm may be a sort of missing (or at least sorely overlooked) link, between doom metal progenitors like Cirith Ungol and Saint Vitus and the stoner-occult, fuzz-and-snarl antics of Electric Wizard. By the time Dopethrone (2000) put that latter band on the mass cultural map, Mystic Charm had flamed out, disappearing into a smoky (ahem) haze. This new compilation LP includes five tracks from a tentative 2017 comeback session, for which Mystic Charm rerecorded tunes from the planned 1999 Hell Did Freeze Over LP; additionally, you’ll hear five songs from a session in the early 1990s, which issued in the “Lost Empire” 7” single. The tunes and tones all sound pretty familiar now, given the sheer number of occult doom records that have been released, the persistence of Electric Wizard’s dope-infused template and the many imitators that followed in that band’s wake. This record indicates that we should reconsider just whose wake that is. Mystic Charm matches distortion with punch, and check out Rini Lipman’s vocals. She growls and howls with appealing menace. It almost makes you miss the Clinton years.

Jonathan Shaw

Old Million Eye — The Air’s Chrysalis Chimes (Feeding Tube/Cardinal Fuzz)

The Air's Chrysalis Chime by Old Million Eye

When most of the band lived in the Bay area, the psychedelic combo Dire Wolves generated recordings at a rate that another Dusted scribe characterized as “dizzying.” But now that key players are scattered from coast to coast, that rate has slowed to a pace that won’t dent your store of Dramamine. But that doesn’t mean they’ve all just quit. While Jeffrey Alexander courts heads on the east coast, synthesizer and bass player Brian Lucas is keeping the torch lit out west under the guise of Old Million Eye. The seven songs on The Air’s Chrysalis Chimes strive for an effect that condensation achieves naturally in rural meadows on early autumn mornings. They’re light and gauzy, and the harder you look, the more they fade away. But they never disappear; they’re just luring you into an unknown zone. Lead on.

Bill Meyer

Salim Nourallah — See You in Marfa (Palo Santo)

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Salim Nourallah spent much of the pandemic releasing a string of EPs, eventually collected in his the World's Weakest Man box set. It seems like the songwriter would be due for another full-length, but he continues his extended play ways with See You in Marfa. This release has a strange origin, coming out of sessions with The Church's Marty Willson-Piper (the two do, in theory, have an LP coming out at some point). One of their collaborations, “Hold on to the Night,” makes an appearance on this EP, an emblematic marker of Nourallah sounding re-energized. It's a wry sort of party anthem, continuously pushing the dawn away. “Not Back to Sad” offers a surprise collaboration between Nourallah and his brother Faris, which should please long-time fans of the pairing (as should the electric guitar tone on this one). The disc's title track marks its other highpoint. It's a straightforward and catchy love song that Nourallah wrote for his girlfriend seven years ago (further evidence that there's a great album hidden among this string of EPs, though that probably doesn't matter in the digital era). See You in Marfa might be a little bit of a stopgap release, continuing the EP procession, but it doesn't sound tossed off. Nourallah might not have put out an album in four years, but he hasn't lost his momentum during that time either.

Justin Cober-Lake

Julie Odell — Autumn Eve (Frenchkiss)

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Julie Odell has a big strong belt, a kicking band and a way with the giant pop climax, so I’m struggling to figure out why I’m so lukewarm on this album. The Louisiana native borrows the accessible parts from her swampy homeland’s legacy, dotting indie confessionals with blues-y slides, country hiccups and even a few cajun dance moves. Maybe it’s the way she stuffs every factor she can think of that sends big pop songs to the rafters into suitcase-sized songs. Take “Cardinal Feather,” for instance, which combines a thundering, Arcade Fire-style beat, a sauntering blues verse, a flexible, variegated vocal attack and some significant mood changes into its five-minute length. It’s all aimed, clearly, at the feel-good, hands-in-the-air, ecstatic end of the pop spectrum, but it seems like too much thought went into how it would be perceived and too little into how it felt and what it meant. Every one of these songs feels like a late show banger, but you don’t really want a whole album of these. Why not let a few of them just be?

Jennifer Kelly

Plastic Bubble — Enchance (Garden Gate)

Enchance by Plastic Bubble

Plastic Bubble is a giddy, goofy, lo-fi psychedelic pop band out of Kentucky, one that started as a vehicle for Matt Taylor’s solo material but has lately grown into a more collaborative effort. Only two of the 13 tracks on Enchance give him sole songwriting credit. The rest are mostly joint or group efforts, with one solo composition by Elisa McCabe, who joined the band in 2012. These are, generally, keyboard-wheedling, drum-machine pounding, exuberant songs, tinged with a euphoric weirdness, but eminently hummable. McCabe’s “Point the Way,” for instance, hitches dreaming, melancholic melodies to a motorik pump of drum machine, with spiraling curls of several different kinds of keyboards jetting off the main tune. Taylor’s “Listening to Genesis” is barer and more wistful, just a sketch in electric piano and mechanized beat. I hope no one takes this the wrong way, but “Water,” reminds me of Daniel Johnson, with its wide-eyed, whatever-blinks-into-my-head lyrics and muscular, buzzy guitars. It is a little insane, but totally committed to it, which makes all the difference.

Jennifer Kelly

Caitlin Rose — “Black Obsidian” (Pearl Tower)

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You’d be forgiven at this point for thinking the look Caitlin Rose is giving over her shoulder on The Stand-In’s cover was her way of saying goodbye, but “Black Obsidian” suggests the seven-year quiet period between that look and the recordings of her forthcoming and oft-delayed Cazimi was only space with which to live darkly a little. With a sweeping flourish not unlike Echo & the Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon” outro, Rose skirts gothic decadence in spinning the tale of what she terms an “impossible puzzle,” a corroded relationship where one person’s overworking to show the other what could be with no success. “Is it that you haven't got it in you, or that you just don't want to?” she sings, letting the final word lilt and float like a blown bubble. But we know the same way she does how inevitable obsidian feels in the spaces no one else can see: If you have to ask the question, a sad and terminally pining part of you already knows the answer.

Patrick Masterson

Wolfbrigade — Anti-Tank Dogs (Armageddon)

Anti-Tank Dogs EP by WOLFBRIGADE

The long-running Swedish crust outfit rolls on with this new 7” EP — and “long-running” doesn’t justly represent Wolfbrigade’s stamina and staying power. Jocke Rydbjer, Erik Norberg and the rest of the band are well into their third decade of decrying social injustice and destroying amps. If you haven’t been paying attention, the semiotics of a Nordic hardcore band invoking wolves and martial organization might give you pause, but you should know that in the late 1990s, they changed their name from Wolfpack to avoid any confusion with or perceived support for a Neo-Nazi prison gang using the same moniker. And sure, there’s some cognitive dissonance in a song that takes on the depredations of warfare by alluding to anti-tank weapons. You can hear some echoes from Ukraine, and the West’s provision of lots and lots of Javelin missiles to the Ukrainian military. It’s ambiguous: Putin’s adventurism is repugnant and brutal, but Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are sure raking in the cash. Wolfbrigade has never been particularly interested in subtlety, and like the band, this EP is a blunt instrument. If you’re interested in muscular d-beat with more than a passing interest in death metal’s burly buzz, here’s your late-summer soundtrack.

Jonathan Shaw

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door · 8 months

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“Most living entities and systems on this planet obviously do not live by the Western human clock (though some, like the crows who memorize a city's daily garbage truck route, do of course adapt to the timing of human activities). To watch a brown creeper as it inches up and down, peering into crevices and extracting bugs with its little dentist beak, is thus a way of catching a ride out of the grid and toward a time sense so different that it is barely imaginable to us. In Jennifer Ackerman's book The Bird Way, I learned that the male black manakin, a South American songbird, can do somersaults so fast that a human can see them only in slowed-down video. Some birdsong contains notes that are sung too quickly or are too high-pitched for us to hear. Veeries, a species related to the American robin, can predict hurricanes months in advance and adjust their migration route accordingly, and no one currently knows how. Birds own bodies and their movements are an entanglement of time and space: If a loon is in the higher latitudes, it's summer, and the bird is mostly black with a striking pattern of white stripes. If the same loon is near my studio in Oakland, it's winter, and the bird is almost unrecognizably different, a dull grayish brown.”

Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (emphasis mine)

#quote #jenny odell #birds

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brandonshimoda · 5 months

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THE BOOKS I READ IN 2023

*I read it before

**I read it more than once this year

Aaron Caycedo-Kimura, Common Grace

Adania Shibli, Minor Detail, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette

Ahmad Almallah, Bitter English

Alison Lubar, It Skips a Generation

Atef Abu Saif, The Drone Eats With Me: A Gaza Diary

Brynn Saito, Under a Future Sky

Camonghne Felix, Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation

*Carolina Ebeid, You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior

Chanté L. Reid, Thot

*Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes

Christine Shan Shan Hou & Vi Khi Nao, Evolution of the Bullet

Christopher Okigbo, Labyrinths (with Paths of Thunder)

Cristina Rivera Garza, Liliana’s Invincible Summer

Dionne Brand, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun

*Dionne Brand, No Language is Neutral

Dionne Brand, Primitive Offensive

Édouard Louis, Who Killed My Father, translated from the French by Lorin Stein

**Emily Lee Luan, 回 / Return

Erin Marie Lynch, Removal Acts

Fady Joudah, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance

Farid Tali, Prosopopoeia, translated from the French by Aditi Machado

Gabriel Palacios, A Ten Peso Burial For Which Truth Is Sign (coming out 2024)

Ghayath Almadhoun, Adrenalin, translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham

Hauntie, To Whitey & The Cracker Jack

Hervé Guibert, To the friend who did not save my life, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale

Hiromi Ito, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, translated from the Japanese by Jon L. Pitt

*James Baldwin, No Name in the Street

*James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

*James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work

James Fujinami Moore, Indecent Hours

Jami Nakamura Lin, The Night Parade

Jawdat Fakhreddine, Lighthouse for the Drowning, translated from the Arabic by Huda Fakhreddine and Jayson Iwen

Jed Munson, Commentary on the Birds

Jennifer Hayashida, A Machine Wrote This Song

Jenny Odell, Inhabiting The Negative Space

Jenny Xie, The Rupture Tense

*Joy Kogawa, A Choice of Dreams

Joy Kogawa, A Garden of Anchors: Selected Poems

**Joy Kogawa, From the Lost and Found Department: New and Selected Poems

Joy Kogawa, Gently to Nagasaki

*Joy Kogawa, Jericho Road

*Joy Kogawa, Obasan

Joy Kogawa, The Rain Ascends

Joy Kogawa, The Splintered Moon

*Joy Kogawa, Woman in the Woods

Juan Felipe Herrera, Akrílica, eds. Farid Matuk, Carmen Giménez, Anthony Cody

Kamo-no-Chomei, Hojoki: Visions of a Torn World, translated from the Japanese by Yasuhiko Moriguchi and David Jenkins

Keorapetse Kgositsile, Collected Poems, 1969-2018

*Kiku Hughes, Displacement

Kōno Taeko, Toddler-Hunting, translated from the Japanese by Lucy North

Leila Khaled, My People Shall Live: Autobiography of a Revolutionary, as told to George Hajjar

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Kaan and Her Sisters

**Lindsey Webb, Plat (coming out in 2024)

Lisa Hsiao Chen, Activities of Daily Living

Liyana Badr, A Balcony over the Fakihani, translated from the Arabic by Peter Clark with Christopher Tingley

Lucille Clifton, An Ordinary Woman

*Lucille Clifton, Blessing the Boats

Lucille Clifton, Good News About the Earth

Lucille Clifton, Good Times

Lucille Clifton, Two-Headed Woman

Mahmoud Darwish, The Butterfly’s Burden, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah

Mahmoud Darwish, If I Were Another, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah

Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine as Metaphor, translated from the Arabic by Amira El-Zein and Carolyn Forché

Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, You Can Be The Last Leaf, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah

Maya Marshall, All the Blood Involved in Love

Michael Prior, Model Disciple

*Mitsuye Yamada, Camp Notes and Other Poems

Mitsuye Yamada, Full Circle: New and Selected Poems

Mohammed El-Kurd, RIFQA

**Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear

Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, translated from the Arabic by Ahdaf Soueif

Mourid Barghouti, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here, translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies

Mourid Barghouti, Midnight, translated from the Arabic by Radwa Ashour

Na Mira, The Book of Na

Najwan Darwish, Nothing More to Lose, translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid

Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro, translated from the Japanese by Edwin McClellan

Nona Fernández, Voyager: Constellations of Memory, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer

Noor Hindi, DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW.

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human, translated from the Japanese by Donald Keene

Osamu Dazai, The Flowers of Buffoonery, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett

The Palestinian Wedding: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Resistance Poetry, edited and translated from the Arabic by A.M. Elmessiri

R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Kappa, translated from Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and Allison Markin Powell

Salim Barakat, Come, Take a Gentle Stab: Selected Poems, translated from the Arabic by Huda J. Fakhreddine and Jayson Iwen

Samih Al-Qasim, All Faces But Mine, translated from the Arabic by Abdulwahid Lu’lu’a

Samih al-Qasim, Sadder Than Water: New & Selected Poems, translated from the Arabic by Nazih Kassis

*Saretta Morgan, Alt-Nature (coming out in 2024)

Satsuki Ina, The Poet and the Silk Girl (coming out in 2024)

Sawako Ariyoshi, The Twilight Years, translated from the Japanese by Mildred Tahara

Shailja Patel, Migritude

Sham-e-Ali Nayeem, City of Pearls

Sharon Yamato, Moving Walls

Shivanee Ramlochan, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting

**shō yamagushiku, shima (coming out in 2014)

Shuri Kido, Names and Rivers, translated from the Japanese by Tomoyuki Endo and Forrest Gander

*Solmaz Sharif, Customs

Stella Corso, Green Knife

*Taha Muhammad Ali, Never Mind: Twenty Poems and a Story, translated from the Arabic by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, Gabriel Levin

Terry Watada, The Game of 100 Ghosts (Hyaku Monogatari Kwaidan-kai)

Victoria Chang, Obit

*Wong May, Superstitions

THE BOOKS I'M CURRENTLY READING, THAT I HAVEN'T FINISHED YET

Chi Rainer Bornfree and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, The Portal (not yet published)

Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now

Eqbal Ahmad, The Selected Writings

Essays, ed. Dorothea Lasky

Fadwa Tuqan, A Mountainous Journey: A Poet's Autobiography, translated from the Arabic by Olive Kenny

James Welch, Winter in the Blood

Lan P. Duong, Nothing Follows

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Touching the Art

Preti Taneja, Aftermath

Wanda Coleman, Wicked Enchantment

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alice-bad-thoughts · 8 months

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Day 4: Song Association

Rag'n'Bone Man – Human

Imagine Dragons – I'm so sorry

Fever ray – If I head a heart

Hippie Sabotage – Trust nobody

Навий день – Seidr

Би-2 – Детство

Mudra – Raja

Hozier – Take me to church

Warduna – Lyfjaberg

Ashe – Moral of the story

Tom Odell – Can't pretend

Scorpions – Still loving you

Undertale OST – Waterfall genocide

Mumford & Song – Little lion man

A perfect circle – Counting bodies like sheep to the rhythm of the war drums

Miracle of sound – Valhalla calling

Anastacia – Left outside alone

Royal deluxe – Bad

Unlike Pluto – Worst in me

Sam Tinnesz – Bloody city

Melanie Martinez – Dollhouse

Trio Mediaeval – Rolandskvadet (The song of Roland)

Nothing more – Go to war

Danheim – Berserkir

Simon George Begg, Cassia Scarlett Littlewood Begg & Damon William Baxter – Gentle

Imagine Dragons – Monster

James Newton Howard, Jennifer Lawrence – The hanging tree

Ólafur Arnalds, Arnór Dan - So far

Bahari – Savage (bitmastr remix)

Taylor Swift – The Great war

#aedion ashryver week #aedion ashryver #throne of glass

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marastriker · 1 year

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#starlight express #pearl the first class carriage #pearl the observation car #stex polls #pearl stex #stex pearl #favorite pearl actress #polls #stex

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peetapiepita · 1 year

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Loving my new header and layout!

There are too many words, so I'm doing a pinned post as well.

Susie. Full-time fangirl, part-time translator.

Been obsessed with The Hunger Games and His Dark Materials for 13 years. Posts are mostly Everlark & Silverparry.

I post meta, gifs, edits, and occasional drawings.

Also might post about writers Taylor Jenkins Reid, John Green, Liane Moriarty, and Holly Black; Directors Zack Synder, Francis Lawrence, and Matt Reeves.

Fav singer-songwriters: Miley Cyrus, Jake Bugg, and Tom Odell.

Fav actors: Shailene Woodley, Josh Hutcherson, and Jennifer Lawrence.

Side favs: Jodie Comer, Tatiana Maslany, Nicholas Galitzine, and Amir Wilson.

And my comic Fav: Terry McGinnis

(Yes, I post about DC stuff every now and then, too. I'm mainly a DCAU fan.)

#pinned post #hunger games #his dark materials #hdm #thg #everlark #silverparry #taylor jenkins reid

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gie-gie-gie-gie · 1 year

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books on my shelf i’d recommend to seventeen

scoups: alice in wonderland and through the looking glass by lewis carroll jeonghan: all about love: new visions by bell hooks joshua: like water for chocolate by laura esquivel jun: the tale of the unknown island by josé saramago hoshi: wonder by r. j. palacio wonwoo: the hero with a thousand faces by joseph campbell woozi: how to do nothing by jenny odell dk: looking for alaska by john green mingyu: the statistical probability of love at first sight by jennifer e. smith the8: art as therapy by alain de botton seungkwan: pride and prejudice by jane austen vernon: a field guide to getting lost by rebecca solnit dino: noli me tángere by jose rizal

#svt #guess which book is my favorite

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byneddiedingo · 1 year

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John Garfield, Pedro Armendáriz, and Jennifer Jones in We Were Strangers (John Huston, 1949)

Cast: Jennifer Jones, John Garfield, Pedro Amendáriz, Gilbert Roland, Ramon Novarro, Wally Cassell, David Bond, José Pérez, Morris Ankrum. Screenplay: Peter Viertel, John Huston, based on a novel by Robert Sylvester. Cinematography: Russell Metty. Art direction: Cary Odell. Film editing: Al Clark. Music: George Antheil.

Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, ten years after We Were Strangers, which deals with an earlier Cuban revolution, was made. Castro's own revolution is probably why this film, despite its major director and stars, is so little known. It was never revived after its initial showing, and didn't become available on video until 2005 despite the reputation of its director, John Huston. It's a fairly scathing look at the failure of the United States to support the overthrow of the Machado dictatorship in 1933. John Garfield plays Tony Fenner, a Cuban-born American who works with the underground revolutionaries to overthrow Machado. He comes up with a rather complicated plot to tunnel into the Colón Cemetery and plant a bomb that will kill the regime's leaders. He enlists a group who have no previous ties with one another, including China Valdés (Jennifer Jones), a bank clerk whose brother was killed by the Havana police chief, Armando Aréte (Pedro Armendáriz), and who lives in a house across the street from the cemetery. The plan is to assassinate a high-ranking member of the regime and detonate the bomb when the dignitaries gather for his funeral. But Fenner's plan is just a little too complicated, and things go awry. It's a curious film to be made just as the red scare was heating up in Washington and Hollywood, for the script by Peter Viertel and director John Huston has no scruples about portraying the violent revolutionaries as heroic. The revolutionaries even countenance the collateral damage of killing innocent people at the funeral, although one of their company has serious reservations about it and, worn down by the hard work of tunneling, goes mad. Garfield, who would soon be threatened with blacklisting as a leftist, gives a typically intense performance, and Jones, though miscast, does a passable imitation of a determined Cuban revolutionary. Armendáriz, whom Hollywood often relegated to Latino sidekick roles, is a fine, sinister villain. Gilbert Roland, as a singing, wisecracking member of the revolutionary team, provides what levity the film possesses, and Ramon Novarro has a cameo as the chief who authorizes Fenner's plan. There's some obvious use of rear projection in which the actors are superimposed against scenes actually filmed in Havana, but Russell Metty's cinematography is mostly quite effective.

#We Were Strangers #John Huston #John Garfield #Pedro Armendáriz #Jennifer Jones

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rinadragomir · 2 years

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HELLO RINA

firstly, a huge congratulations for 2700 followers, that number is just mindblowing! and you deserve every single one and more

would i please be able to request:

🌻 - and my fav songs are reflections by the neighbourhood, raw thoughts by baby queen and forgiveness by rina sawayama

and i would also like to request 🏔

congrats again my darling <3

HELLO🌿🌱☘️🌿 ohhh yes it is🥺

Your playlist:

Bülow - You & Jennifer

The neighborhood - scary love

Regina Spektor - Après Moi

Paramore - this is why

Madilyn Bailey - Tetris

Tom Odell - Can't pretend

Florence and the Machine - Howl

Daughter - no care

SHAED - Trampoline

MISSIO - bottom of the deep blue sea

Svrcina - Who Are you

Surprise is already in your askbox 💗🌸🌷

#2.7k celebration

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kingsoverjacks · 2 months

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Gorgeous leggy Jennifer O’Dell!

#Jennifer Odell #Jennifer O’Dell #rocking body #great legs #great thighs #great rack #legs for days #legendary legs #great body #great hips #dancer body #power thighs #the lost world

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the-book-queen · 8 months

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Hide your wallets, it's that time again! Your daily thread of romance deals is ready, FREE to $1.99!

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$1.99 ✦ Famous for a Living by Melissa Ferguson

1st POV. NYC social media influencer needing to get away from the spotlight goes to Montana and falls for a park ranger.

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#book deals #romance novels #contemporary romance #historical romance #romantic suspense #mf romance

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deadcactuswalking · 1 year

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REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 24/12/2022 (LadBaby’s Christmas Garbage & Central Cee)

So this is Christmas. And what have you done? You’ve only gone and given LadBaby their fifth Christmas #1, meaning they now have more than the Beatles, for God’s sake. Regardless of who’s at the top, this is the most important chart of the year – arguably the only one that matters to anyone but chart nerds – and I have to cover all of the madness that it has ensued this year. Joy. Welcome back to REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

Rundown

Well, I guess we can start where we always start with our notable dropouts... but I think I’m actually going to start with our top 10, as that’s what matters really. At #10, we see “Firebabe” by Stormzy largely because of an Amazon-exclusive orchestral version, and at #9, we have another UK rapper that probably shouldn’t be here: Central Cee. He is actually debuting at #9 with “LET GO” – more on that later. Then we get to the Christmas classics: at #8, we have “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” by Brenda Lee and at #7, we have that band that I can’t discuss because this is a family show (ostensibly), with their song “F the Tories”. It happens every year, and I’ll be covering it in great detail when the time comes. RAYE’s “Escapism.” featuring 070 Shake is the final song that’s not some kind of Christmas tune at #6. Then our top five consists of songs that very well could have grabbed that Christmas #1: “Merry Christmas” by Ed Sheeran and Elton John at #5 pretty much cementing its place in the canon, “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey at #4, and then... the Sidemen with “Christmas Drillings”. KSI and co. released several remixes – as is the trend – in an attempt to grab the Christmas #1 and whilst they didn’t end the week with a crown they made a pretty damn good effort for a song that doesn’t even credit its main features, KSI and Jme, and wasn’t even in the top 40 last week. Finally, we have that ever-important race for the #1, as “Last Christmas” by Wham! ends up at #2, behind “Food Aid” by LadBaby... which we will also be discussing in great detail when the time comes.

Now to briefly cover everything else before we get to the new entries. Firstly, we have our notable dropouts – songs exiting the UK Top 75, which is what I cover, after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. Really, all we have here are “Lavender Haze” by Taylor Swift, “Kiss Me” by Dermot Kennedy, “Under the Influence” by Chris Brown, “As it Was” by Harry Styles and “Another Love” by Tom Odell. These sound like big losses, but they’ll likely be back next week or the week after as since the tracking week includes Christmas for next week, the transition will not be as smooth. As I don’t talk about each and every Christmas song, and the highest are in the top 10, I may as well just note that “Mary’s Boy Child / Oh My Lord” by Boney M. is back at #73 and “Oh Santa!” by Mariah Carey featuring Ariana Grande and Jennifer Hudson is back at #60. As pretty much all of our notable gains are, as you’d expect, festive tunes (it was a slow week outside of the top 10), I say we waste no time getting to those songs, but we’ve still got one to go yet before all of that chaos, that being...

NEW ARRIVALS

#58 – “Christmas Without You” – Ava Max

Produced by Gian Stone and Cirkut

In 2020, Ava Max released a Christmas song, and it took two years for it to reach the top 75. I generally like Ava Max, especially her newer stuff, so I was excited to hear this and is it any good? Well, it’s cute enough. I find the rhythm a bit stunted and particularly awkward since Ava clearly wants to bring a sultry looseness to the song that feels a bit behind the main synth lead and the drums that are just pretty perfunctory. In terms of content, it’s again, cute enough, very much in the “All I Want for Christmas is You” mould but a tad more longing, in a way that makes the chorus really hit each time, thanks to the blend of keys, the infectious melody and those background harmonies in the bridge that makes the song feel kind of delicate and desperate. It’s a subtle touch in a very unsubtle song but combined with a great vocal performance, I can easily ignore some of its initial flaws and look at it as a packaged pop song as a whole, as we probably should do with Ava Max and, yeah, it’s pretty decent. It’s definitely made for an advert if anything but nowadays, isn’t commercialism what Christmas is all about?

#9 – “LET GO” – Central Cee

Produced by Nastylgia and KwolleM

So... you remember “Let Her Go” by Passenger, the 2012 sleeper hit that defined some of the worst years in recent memory when it comes to pop music, those being 2013 and 2014? Well, I certainly do and whilst I never really liked his frail voice, the minimal acoustics or the pleading nature of the song, it’s not all that bad. It probably didn’t deserve one billion streams on Spotify or peaking at #2 in the UK but I can say that for most songs that get those accolades. Well, if you’re sick of the song, Cench has revived it with a song that he hyped up on TikTok only for his girlfriend not to approve of it. Sure, she later “changed her mind”, but it’s easy to change your mind on speaking out against misogyny when Warner Music Group come knocking. Regardless, the sample caught enough ears for it to debut at #9 in a Christmas week, and I can’t think of anything less festive. Not only is the song genuinely horrible in how it turns an already dubious acoustic track into a pretty disgustingly possessive track with standard drill percussion that just feels tacked onto this vague sample idea, but it’s just confusing. Cench uses the weirdest and laziest of verses, as he still “smells the flesh” of his ex on the bedsheets, is feeling “depressed and stuff” and feels that their chemistry is wrong “like quantum physics, physics”... before rapping over where the chorus should have probably been in a relentless way that is just fascinatingly pathetic. His flow is so rambling and basically just a constant aggressive form of speech, especially when the beat is taken out for the second verse wherein Cench tries to desperately prove that there’s no intimacy within the sex he has with other women by describing the sex positions in detail, and saying that he doesn’t even take his socks off whilst doing it, before ending the verse by flexing his cash in a complete non-sequitur because of course he does. Honestly, this sounds less like a song and more of an angry set of left-on-read voice messages misshapen into some kind of amalgamation of a pop song, with a cheap sample flip to guarantee some kind of success. If gimmicky samples and over-sharing on what should be novelty tracks essentially become Central Cee’s thing, I’d be worried about his shelf-life.

#7 – “F the Tories” – [EXPLETIVE DELETED] featuring Terry Edwards

Produced by ???

For the past few years, this Basildon comedian has been trying to compete for the Christmas #1 with songs that get more scathing and actually detailed every year, with a stupid amount of remixes, and really, much of what I’ll say about LadBaby later can apply to this guy and his group too, but when the songs are actively pointing out changes that we as humans can make to prevent more economic downturn, going for populism that actually works as he lists off political parties because hey, at least they’re not the Tories, it’s a lot harder to dislike them. It’s not in an immense detail, but for a stupid, cheapo Christmas song with a glam rock groove and cheap saxophone, it’s an effective protest song with the same talking points you’ve always heard... but you hear them for a reason. There’s a one minute version, then a two-minute version that adds a bridge that does make the song a lot better, operating on the same “us vs. them” ideology that this guy perpetually functions on, and I’m not sure if it’s really more useful than what LadBaby’s going for but at least he has some balls. Plunderphonics and political comedy legends Cassetteboy come in with a remix wherein they do what they do best: cutting up vocals from speeches made by each Conservative PM since David Cameron and making them say what they really mean, to the groove of the original song. It’s not the smoothest of their remixes but it’s genuinely admirable and clever in how they’ve put it together. The Dead Men Talking remix talks about LadBaby’s cheating scandals and doubts his charity in a scathing “sausage roll mix”, though I don’t know if he actually fingers cats and that seems like a baseless accusation. There’s a “Folksticks Folk the Tories” mix which is as you’d expect, a folksy acoustic number not too far from Chumbawumba’s more traditional Celtic-sounding music, there’s a Spray remix which makes it sound like a 90s or 2000s pop pastiche, and it’s kind of hilarious, especially with the female vocals that remind me of another Christmas #1, “Mr Blobby”. There’s a remix by Rob Manuel that turns it into a reggae number with a really basic beat and warping bass that doesn’t entirely work but the point is very much not in the music with these guys, there’s a Petrol Bastard remix that adds a rap verse that ends up meandering into bars about IKEA, there’s a steampunk-rap remix by Mr. B the Gentleman Rhymer which functions as a “We Didn’t Start the Fire” type of event-listing track before it inexplicably becomes a drum and bass tune, there’s a metal mix by Armagortion that kicks serviceable enough amount of ass even if it is pretty comical, there’s a remix by sks2002 and the Wronguns that makes it a 90s breakbeat pastiche almost reminiscent of The KLF with some gross Auto-Tune added for good measure, and there’s an “Ego Trippin Remix” that is completely incoherent. It starts with a nice enough Christmas jingle before erupting into a volcanic mudpie of a track that is just grimey as all hell. There’s a “Poxy Music” edit that is a riff off of Roxy Music but doesn’t really make much of a change from the original’s glam rock sound to work – hell, the saxophone sounds better in this version, it may as well have been the original – there’s a house remix by Ricardo Autobahn wherein Supertanskiii counts down her least favourite Tories, as the Basildon comedians croon about Neil Parish’s tractor escapades, there’s a “SFW radio mix” and a corresponding shortened version that replaces the F-word with “stuff”, and of course, there’s a remix by the Anal Bleach Boys that adds some extra verses and oddly pleasant harmonies. That’s all 17 versions of this song reviewed. My favourite is probably the version by Ricardo Autobahn or Cassetteboy, but the Poxy Music and Mr. B the Gentleman Rhymer edits get pretty close. I would like to thank this band of which I cannot utter the name of because they make this episode a lot longer every time... not that I needed help this year.

#1 – “Food Aid” – LadBaby

Produced by Jamie Sellers

So everyone knows “Do They Know it’s Christmas?”, right? In 1984, Bob Geldof and Midge Ure wrote a song and gave it to everyone who was a pop singer in the 1980s, gathering them all in a recording session that later became a music video, so they could raise funds for the famine in Ethiopia. It’s a bold and admirable cause, of course, because Geldof did stand up to Thatcher at the time to take VAT off of the single so that everyone could buy it to raise more money. It’s not the first ever charity single but it may be the most important and pioneering one: it created a trend, dare I say, genre, of songs featuring celebrities who could have paid out of their own pockets – and very well may have – but are instead forcing the idea of payment onto you, the listener, because of the capitalist myth that it’s “every little thing” a person does in their life that makes a difference towards causes like famine, war and global warming, when in reality, those on the ground in London have no influence over the conglomerates and governments that are making minimal progress towards fighting these causes or outright contributing to them. The elite sings back to you once you give them your money: “you’re doing the right thing”. To be fair to Geldof, as far as I’m aware, the money went to Ethiopia – he didn’t Wyclef Jean his way out of this one – and also to be fair, the intentions are more admirable in 1984 than they seem now. The biggest crime may be that the song is one of the worst of all time, with its primitive rhythm section seemingly perfunctory to the sing-songy chime of the fake bells that allow for a cacophony of stars to oversell their condescending lyrics to people who are just trying to live. The main idea of “Do They Know it’s Christmas?” is a dreadful message: asking Africa if they even know it’s Christmastime as if they are unable to figure out the concept of time, seasons or religious celebrations. “Christmas” is little but a decoration with this song, using it to trickle down some faux emotion into a day and season that people actually hold dear. The lyrics paint a diverse continent with so broad a brush you’d think they’re scrambling for territory, and Bono belting that line, “Tonight, thank God it’s them instead of you”, may be the worst moment in music ever. Whatever good intentions Geldof and Ure had are stripped away by that one line: hey, at least we’re not suffering, it’s just those guys in Africa, and they’re always suffering, right? It’s nothing to do with us: the best we can do is flash some money at Duran Duran and hope they solve the famine in Ethiopia. Sadly, even through all my sarcasm, there’s some truth to the idea that we’re helpless in solving these problems, and really these singles end up reinforcing that point. As a result, even though Geldof will be the first to admit that he wrote the worst song in history, it works every single time. It was #1 in 1984, it was #1 in 1989, again in 2004, once again in 2014, and thanks to Mark and Roxanne Hoyle, it’s #1 in 2022.

The crime that “Food Aid” commits may be the most obvious of all: it tries to make the lyrics that were vague enough to work for any African famine but were specifically tailored to a 1984 zeitgeist relevant to the cost of living crisis in the UK. LadBaby as always is supporting the food bank network Trussell Trust, and to be fair to Mr. Hoyle, the songs do seem to help the Trust in feeding the underprivileged, and as far as it can be seen, the Trust is a reliable enough charity. However, if he’s going to mention that the “nation’s skint and underpaid”, maybe challenge why that’s the case? Maybe the UK needs less of Martin Lewis’ money-saving tips, which is a bizarre inclusion in itself considering the man claims not to do ads yet has made a living off of telling poorer people how to save money and is now basically doing free promotion for these blokes, and maybe the UK needs some efficient government welfare, and not one preoccupied with keeping its cronies in order as a party practically dissolves without letting the people have a say in who should be running the country. Just maybe LadBaby could make a statement, right? He’s painting with just as broad a brush in a way that probably didn’t need to be so snugly non-partisan when it’s 2022 and we’ve all seen the bloody state of the Conservatives and their impact on the economy. Have some balls, man, not everything needs to be dressed up in enough festivity and faux wholesomeness so that you can get a choir of special needs children to sing it – classy move to exploit a group of people for a remix that’ll grab you another #1 for your ego... which somehow doesn’t work every year since people still ask, every December, “who the Hell is LadBaby?” It doesn’t help that it’s a cheap recording with people who can’t sing, as is usual for LadBaby records, which could be endearingly DIY if Martin Goddamn Lewis wasn’t here. What also bugs me about redressing this song is that whilst he took the offensive lyrics out, that doesn’t get rid of the neo-colonial stench that this song will always have. Fuse ODG was asked to sing on the 2014 version, which replaced the most infamous lyric, but also claimed that there was no hope and joy in West Africa... and you know, Fuse ODG is actually FROM West Africa and refused to sing on the grounds of, well, it’s just incorrect and paints an image of Africa that the BBC may want to depict but isn’t what is happening on the ground. You could argue that it’s not relevant – he’s even changed “feed the world” to “feed the UK” – but when ethnic minorities are being worst-hit by this crisis, this on-the-nose song choice seems a bit insensitive. People Like Us reports that 41% of British people with a non-white British background are worrying about losing their jobs, compared to 27% of white Britons. Ethnic minorities are more likely to have to borrow money and skip meals and simultaneously expect less government support to keep them alive... yet the only black person in that video is someone paid to impersonate Stormzy. That same superiority complex that appeared in Band Aid’s version to rake up some kind of populist energy and make everyone think they’re doing the right thing is here in “Food Aid”, it’s just more subtle and more local this time, because as racism evolves, it becomes less outright and more systemic. Good intentions never collapse harder than when injected with a sense of supremacy that is probably lost within all the goodwill.

I know that this is a long political rant regarding LadBaby, an artist and a song I should not care about at all since he’ll probably be gone next week, but it’s still hard to believe year upon year when I listen into the radio show and LadBaby has to keep the charity in his mouth so that the radio host blabbering on about how he’s got more Christmas #1s than the Beatles doesn’t seem like the selling point when in reality, that’s the case, and “Christmas” in itself is still little but a decoration for his selling of his own narrative. You could argue that even if a man gains more from his charity than the knowledge of giving unto others, it’s just a benefit of the fact that he helped those less privileged than him, but when he plays into the pop mould, interpolates a downright racist single, and carves into what remains of the UK’s Christmas culture his own calculated cult of personality for the fifth year in a row... I find it hard to believe that the Trussell Trust is even in mind half the time. John 3:17 – “If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.”

Conclusion

With all that said, I’m going to ignore that charity singles exist for the Best and Worst of the Week, which go to Ava Max and Central Cee respectively for “Christmas Without You” and “LET GO”. I know it’s easy to forget that those songs were also reviewed in this episode considering, well, everything else, but they’re what deserves to be mentioned here.

As the year concludes, because really, the Christmas week is probably the most “final” of any given episode, even though the tracking week for next week actually is the one that includes Christmas Day, I would like to thank everyone who has read or even acknowledged this little hobby of mine that takes up more of my mindspace than I’d like to admit. I know that this series can get political and cynical but obsessing over pop music, the data surrounding it, the milestones they break and the impact on pop culture – or lack thereof – is genuinely a great passion of mine. I’ve been doing this review format in some way on Tumblr for years, and before that I was obviously still following charts and consuming music, and I find it pretty beautiful how something so simple like pop music can attract so much warranted discussion and opinion, to the point where perhaps it isn’t that simple at all (as you can tell by this episode). Clearly something in it has kept me doing it for all this time. Attached below is my year-end list of my favourite music releases of 2022 if any of you are interested but other than that, as this is the final episode of REVIEWING THE CHARTS Season 4, thank you for reading, happy holidays and, because the charts never stop for a rest, I’ll see you next week for Season 5!

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