#the most blackstar song ever

[glittergoats]

President Heartbeat

(Turn Me Into Somebody New)

[whatabloodbath]

A generalization of how I headcannon cats of the clans to look like

I wanted to give myself a bit of an art challenge when it comes to drawing characters in warriors by making each clan having a specific look to its members.

Riverclan was based more on semi-aquatic felines, like the jaguar and tiger, as well as other marine animals like otters and sea lions. I imagine that it is common for cats to have a slick, almost oily top coat and a very thick undercoat to manage their body temperatures better in land and in water; the end result being something sleek and plush simultaneously. I also imagine it to be common for most Riverclan cats to have a very muscular body type considering that strength would be needed to push past currents much more easily. Their heads, in proportion to their bodies, are small with a smooth nose bridge and forehead, and their ears are pointed backwards by default to lessen any drag while swimming.

Windclan, however, I did not want to be super bulky mainly because speed is their thing. Considering their tunneling behaviors mentioned in the books, I imagine their claws to be hard and relatively thick, much like that of a dog. I based their design on felines known for their unique, lanky appearance and quickness, like the cheetah and serval, but also on canines like the jackal and greyhound. Their noses and ears are quite large to dissipate heat after a long run, and their eyelashes are particularly long to shield their eyes from any debris that could fall into them while running. Their eyebrow ridges are also more prominent to protect their gaze from the sun, considering that there are not many trees -- if any -- to shade them.

It was a bit difficult trying to find some inspiration for Shadowclan, mainly because they just seemed like edgier Thunderclan; however, I remembered what kind of environment they lived in as well as their reputation as the "evil clan," mostly also according to Thunderclan. So, I thought: what other reasons would Thunderclan have to be so distrustful of these cats besides the decisions of cats like Brokenstar and Blackstar? Thinking more about Thunderclan's attitude towards cats outside of their clan as well as their own members made me realize that their distaste for Shadowclan could be just as shallow. I got inspired by how Tad Williams described the Clawguard in Tailchaser's Song: short, stocky, almost reptilian in appearance. I also based their design off of animals like hyenas and bulkier mustelids, like badgers and wolverines -- animals that are often associated with aggression and gluttony as well as their association with darkness. Overall, I wanted to make them built for stealth and night life, as well as mobility over slick, muddy terrain. Their heads in particular I wanted to pay more attention to: almost all of their senses are dedicated towards navigation in the dark. However, I also imagine that they are not very picky about the foods they eat; although they have long, sharp teeth that make it easier to grip onto slippery prey, I imagine they would not be above eating carrion if they came across it. So, I made their heads more bulky and well-muscled to accommodate eating tougher foods as well as dealing a much nastier bite than most cats in the forest.

Lastly, I drew Thunderclan. I believed it would be fitting to make them the "most feline resembling" of the forest cats, especially since they were the first clan that we ever read about and that had much more focus than the others, so I wanted them to be more recognizably felid than the others. I wanted to make them built for a more arboreal lifestyle, especially since I imagine climbing to be one of their specialized skills. I based their design mostly off of mountain lions, especially in their body type, but also off of cats like the margay and the leopard. Their wrists, in particular, I wanted to be extra flexible and their paws to be more handlike in order for them to scale trees with speed and ease. Their tails are long to give them balance, and their hindlegs are long and muscular so they can jump higher and farther when traversing across branches.

Note: I did not add a body type for Skyclan mainly because I believe there is no general body type for them -- at least, not for its modern members. In the forest, Thunderclan seemed to have taken over that niche once Skyclan was kicked out.

[dustedmagazine]

Tim Clarke’s 2022: Light at the end of the tunnel?

The Smile photo by Alex Lake

I don’t want to curse anyone by saying it out loud, but could 2022 be the turning point after a truly horrendous couple of years? For me, the very fact that two-fifths of Radiohead put out an excellent album already makes this year notable. However, I was also lucky enough to get great new albums by favorites Big Thief, Dry Cleaning, and Aldous Harding. Plus, this year I’ve seen more live music than the previous two years combined. Here’s to 2023 continuing this upward trajectory of more great music, both recorded and live.

1. The Smile — A Light For Attracting Attention (XL)

Any Radiohead-related project is guaranteed to pique my interest, but one involving Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood? Having said that, even I was surprised at just how good A Light For Attracting Attention turned out. Veering from spectral balladry to twitchy post-punk, there’s not only variety here, but also a satisfying narrative arc, some great playing from all three members, plus the exciting prospect of another Smile album in the near future.

2. Big Thief — Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You (4AD)

Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You by Big Thief

After giving us two albums in 2019, Big Thief returned with a double album of surprising diversity and consistently high quality. At its best (“Little Things,” “Sparrow,” “Simulation Swarm”), DNWMIBIY feels like Big Thief could go anywhere from here, and if the rumors are true, there are as many more songs on the cutting-room floor as made it onto this 20-track monster. Here’s to another Big Thief album in 2023.

��3. Dry Cleaning — Stumpwork (4AD)

Dry Cleaning’s second album in two years catches this inimitable London band on a roll. There’s enough musical evolution from last year’s New Long Leg to ensure this isn’t just more of the same, though Florence Shaw’s lyrics and delivery are as funny as ever. Plus, Tom Dowse continues to be one of the most inventive and tuneful electric guitarists of recent years.

 4. Black Country, New Road — Ants from Up There (Ninja Tune)

Ants From Up There by Black Country, New Road

Much like Bowie passing away soon after the release of Blackstar, Isaac Wood leaving Black Country, New Road soon after the release of Ants from Up There is the kind of artistic move that feels preordained. This is a massive, ridiculous, intricate, and deeply moving album, and one that I doubt the remaining members of the band will top in Wood’s absence.

5. Stephen Becker — A Calm That Shifts (NNA Tapes)

Apparently, Stephen Becker worked on his solo debut for years between playing in countless other bands — and you can hear it. A Calm That Shifts is the kind of debut that spotlights a talent who has been quietly working in the margins of other people’s music for a long time, refining his craft. This is the kind of expansive folk-pop that has the songs, subtlety, and depth to slowly win you over.

 6. billy woods — Aethiopes (Backwoodz Studioz)

Aethiopes by billy woods

It’s rare I listen to hip-hop at all, let alone hear an album that blows me away, but getting billy woods’ Aethiopes in the Mid-Year Exchange was a revelation. I haven’t been this excited about a hip-hop album since Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein, way back in 2001. On Aethiopes, woods paints vivid pictures of urban desolation, set to producer Preservation’s woozy patchwork of old blues and jazz samples.

7. Aldous Harding — Warm Chris (4AD)

It’s hard to know how to take Aldous Harding’s shapeshifting vocal persona. On Warm Chris she’s more playful yet more seriously committed than ever to all the roles in her songwriting, making for some deliciously disorientating pop music. Perhaps not as consistent as her last full-length, Designer, but certainly as charming.

 8. Living Hour — Someday is Today (Next Door)

Though it includes my favorite song of the year in “Feelings Meeting,” Living Hour’s third album has plenty of other great songs. “Feelings Meeting” stands out as a thrilling shoegaze masterstroke, while most of the rest of the record is the kind of narcotized dream-pop Beach House do so well.

 9. Daniel Rossen — You Belong There (Warp)

You Belong There by Daniel Rossen

God knows when we’ll next get another Grizzly Bear record. Until then, Daniel Rossen’s solo debut will more than suffice. On You Belong There, his guitar playing is immaculate, and he doesn’t spare any indulgence on the arrangements either, layering instruments liberally across these stridently morose compositions.

10. Skullcrusher — Quiet the Room (Secretly Canadian)

Quiet the Room by Skullcrusher

It’s been a long time since I’ve heard an album playing in a record store full stop, let alone one that’s prompted me to ask at the desk what’s playing on the turntable. So it was with Skullcrusher. It immediately reminded me of Grouper, but less shy and less smothered in hazy melancholy. Quiet the Room is still a deeply introverted record, but one whose sounds are unafraid to shine, mainly thanks to Big Thief producer Andrew Sarlo’s sterling job at the desk. 

Another excellent ten (in alphabetical order):

Oren Ambarchi / Johan Berthling / Andreas Werliin — Ghosted (Drag City)

Ellen Arkbro & Johan Graden — I get along without you very well (Thrill Jockey)

Disassembler — A Wave From A Shore (Western Vinyl)

Goon — Hour of Green Evening (Demode)

Gwenno — Tresor (Heavenly)

Horse Lords — Comradely Objects (RVNG Intl.)

Cate Le Bon — Pompeii (Mexican Summer)

Market — The Consistent Brutal Bullshit Gong (Western Vinyl)

Shearwater — The Great Awakening (Polyborus)

Winged Wheel — No Island (12XU)

Tim Clarke

[moonlight404-translates]

Hey, same person who told you which A3! VAs can rap, again. TY for the recent Hisoka translation. It’s interesting that the setting is at a festival feat. “goldfishes.” Though I’m not sure how TWST’s Riddle would react to a “goldfish” festival and/or at someone who told him about it & I mean Floyd. Also after doing some Internet research, the goldfish-shaped lantern that Hisoka (& I think Itaru in his card as well) was holding is an actual lantern craft mostly seen in the town of Yanai in Yamaguchi Prefecture where the city celebrates in a lantern festival showcasing the goldfish-shaped lanterns. Moreover, the goldfish-shaped lantern was created by a Yanai local inspired from the Neputa Festival in Aomori.

In Fragaria Memories, there’s a new MV where all the cast members sing together called “Bouquet of Wishes.” Speaking of musics, you can listen to the cast solo versions of “EVER RED,” “青空のメモリー,” & “ALL SO BAD.” For example, you can listen to the solo version of “ALL SO BAD” by Juza’s VA and/or Kumon’s VA.

In BLACKSTAR, the current event has Saki(the heroine) going on vacation w/ TeamW & there will be another event where Saki goes on vacation w/ TeamK. Also, the TeamW cards are way too sexy & based on the preview, TeamK’s will be sexy, too.

Also in TWST, do remember to get the free 10-fold key on Ortho’s B-day in JPN time. And this is optional, but before you read the Main Story Octavinelle’s dreams Ch., listen to A3!’s “The Contract” ‘cause the song sometimes helped others before fighting the Overblot battle in the Octavinelle Ch.

I'm pretty sure Floyd would jokingly tell Riddle that they should go to that festival. This was my first time hearing about this festival. I'm very curious about the play, sadly I couldn't get Tsuzuru's card.

They have solo versions? That's so cool. I have to listen to them.

Vacations, yay! Sin's card is the most yabai from the TeamW set;;

Thank you for the reminder. About the song, so true. It helps set the mood. I will do it.

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #576

Top Ten Years for Music

Yeah I’m doing it again, and this was the hardest one to do. Because generally speaking I don’t really associate music with the year it came out. Almost all of the time I come to it a lot later – which is why there are hardly any recent years on this list. I’ll probably be into a half-dozen songs from 2022 in fifteen years.

Music, to me, was always a background thing. I never had a desire to seek it out or find out what I was into in the same way I’ve always wanted to know more about film. And as such, when I became a bit older, I felt very out of touch and ill-informed by what music was around. The first CDs I ever bought were soundtrack albums because I just didn’t know what bands I liked, and by then I was also infected by the teenage need to like the right bands. What if I accidentally bought something by someone who wasn’t cool? Or if I mentioned liking them but then exposed how I only liked them because I liked that one song of theirs that was in a Curly Wurly ad or something?

Despite this, we’re still going to see a whole lot of nostalgia on this list. Is it always the case that the music that really resonates is the music you listen to in your teenage years? Even if – like me – you weren’t going to concerts or buying tons of CDs, the music permeates your social consciousness from the radio, from hearing it played in stores, from seeing the artists on TV, and from your friends talking about it. I didn’t own a Blur CD until 1999 and I don’t think I’ve owned one by Oasis, but I could have explained the broad strokes of their music and their rivalry back when Country House and Roll With It released in the same week. So it all sticks and it becomes part of your DNA, the soundtrack to whatever dumb crap you were doing at the time.

Anyway, enough wallowing in the Our Price of history: let’s just look at the years of my life that I thought had the best music. And, yes, this is the most subjective because I think of all things, maybe music is the most subjective? So it’s stuff I liked. You don’t like it? Get your own blog, they’re free!

1984: yes! Seriously! 1984 continues to be one of the best years of all time. If it’s not enough that films like Terminator and shows like Transformers and comics like Turtles all came out, you’ve got the debut albums of both Bon Jovi and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – I mean, come on. Queen’s The Works gave us songs like Radio Ga Ga and I Want to Break Free. Prince made Purple Rain. Springsteen released Born in the U.S.A., for cryin’ out loud! Dancing in the Dark, people! We had Spinal Tap! And speaking of movies, Ghostbusters! I mean, can you imagine? Flippin’ ‘eck, what a year.

1997: it’s tough to single out one year from the nineties, because there’s a period – ’93-’98 really – that’s just chock-full of absolute iconic bangers for me. But this is probably tip-top. We’ve got one of Nick Cave’s best, most soulful albums, in Boatman’s Call, which features possibly my favourite song – Into My Arms. Foo Fighters’ The Colour and the Shape, Radiohead’s OK Computer, Savage Garden’s, er, Savage Garden. Robbie Williams – love him or hate him – did release two of his best songs, Let Me Entertain You and Angels. And a personal favourite of mine was Del Amitri’s Don’t Come Home Too Soon, the best song ever about football.

2016: woah, we’re getting right up to date here! Can you believe it?! But it was a cracker, despite Trump and Brexit and everything else that was happening. Both Bowie and Leonard Cohen released their final albums, and in a way delivered their own epitaphs with Blackstar and especially You Want it Darker, the latter of which is an absolute masterpiece. “I’m leaving the table, I’m out of the game”, for goodness’ sake. If you really want it dark, Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree was haunting beautiful but also a wail of absolute grief; “They told us our gods would outlive us but they lied”. Slightly cheerier was Foreverland by Divine Comedy, with its propulsive revolutionary undertones and superheroic love songs. And rocketing right to the other end of the scale from all the mournful ballads was Lonely Island’s soundtrack to Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. Is Finest Girl the funniest song of all time?

1996: yep, back to the nineties, and back to the Bad Seeds (Murder Ballads, which includes Cave’s famous duet with Kylie) and back to Divine Comedy (Casanova). Almost defnining my mid-teens, we had the Manics’ Everything Must Go and Spiders by Space, as well as the debut album from the Aquabats. Probably one of the most seminal releases – certainly for me at the time – was the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, featuring possibly my favourite song of the year, the Cardigans’ Lovefool. What else? Well we had two other big debuts: the Spice Girls and Eminem. What more could you want?

1993: still in the nineties and it’s back to another perennial year for me: ’93, the year of Jurassic Park and, well, tons of other stuff. Check out m other lists. Anyway, musically we had Bat out of Hell 2, which was nice as I wasn’t born when the first one came out. He’d do anything for love, y’know, but he won’t do that. Radiohead’s Pablo Honey gave us Creep, my favourite of theirs, because I’m basic. Crash Test Dummies released Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm, a weird delight. We also got 500 Miles, Loser by Beck, Insane in the Brain – which everyone my age was singing in 1993 – and sort of Whitney’s I Will Always Love You, which technically released at the end of ’92 but dominated the early part of the year and was ‘93’s biggest song.

1995: sticking with the mid-nineties and it’s another belter. Alright by Supergrass; These Days by Bon Jovi; the Foo Fighters’ eponymous debut; The Bends by Radiohead. I could go on. And I shall! One of my favourite albums, Different Class by Pulp, gave us some corking class-warfare ballads like Common People. And, yes, it was Britpop’s holy year, with the Blur/Oasis clash and the release of both What’s the Story (Morning Glory) and The Great Escape. Quite possibly my favourite song of the year – sorry, Jarvis – was Alanis Morrisette’s You Oughta Know from Jagged Little Pill, one hell of an angry tune and my generation’s equivalent to The Winner Takes it All. But with a bit more swearing.

1982: right back as far as we can go in my lifetime, really, and it all starts off so well. Madonna’s first album! Bloody hell! And Jacko’s Thriller! Scary stuff. That alone could get it rocketing up the charts, but we also have one of my favourite Bruce Springsteen songs, Highway Patrolman, even if (whisper it) I kinda prefer the Johnny Cash version. Also there was Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast (spoiler alert: it’s 666), and Billy Joel’s Nylon Curtain, giving us tracks like Allentown and the phenomenal Goodnight Saigon. And – yes – Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger.

1998: another all-round classic year – Half-Life came out and I started going out with my wife – and the music wasn’t bad either. Space’s Tin Planet featured The Ballad of Tom Jones; we had Torn, Bittersweet Symphony, and You’re Still the One, just a bunch of stone-cold hits. Evanescence’s debt album provided turn-of-the-millennium action movies with great songs to cut scenes to. The Divine Comedy’s Fin de Siècle had some of the tracks that really drew my attention to the band. The hilarious One Week was a fast-paced good-natured highlight of a song, but let’s wrap up by lifting a glass to a genius movie ballad, Aerosmith’s I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing. I could stay awake just to hear them singing.

2002: another good year for Robbie, with probably – aw hell, definitely – his best album, Escapology, which has his two best songs (for me): Monsoon and Come Undone. Flight of the Conchords’ first album had so many all-time hilarious songs I don’t know where to begin. A Rush of Blood to the Head is my favourite Coldplay album, largely because of The Scientist. Avril Lavigne’s debut album was released, giving us both Complicated and Sk8ter Boi, and holy cats, can you get more millennial? But musically I have to say the year belongs to Johnny Cash and The Man Comes Around, an album full of incredible, emotional, resonant songs – including, of course, his cover of Hurt. 

1994: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Let Love In gave us a lot of tremendous songs (including the haunting and disturbing two-part Do You Love Me) but really it should be known most for Red Right Hand, one of the biggest and most important songs of my life (I first heard in The X-Files!). Also there’s Green Day’s Basket Case, Blur’s Parklife (in both cases the first albums I had from both bands), and the biggest song of the year, Wet Wet Wet’s Love is All Around. It really was everywhere I go in ’94. Sticking with movies for a bit, two of the best soundtracks of my life: Pulp Fiction and The Lion King. Yes, musicals absolutely do count; maybe I should have tried to look them up in a bit more detail. Too late now!

I very, very nearly had 2006 in there at the end instead of another nineties number, but despite a few good tracks that year I ultimately decided I was letting the sheer cosmic weight of Arctic Monkeys’ debut lift the year up too high. I’ve always tried to find a good balanced spread when doing this and not stick a year in there just because there’s one or even two things I like, and ultimately the epoch-shifting excellence of I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor was not enough to champion the whole year. But I’m mentioning it now, in dispatches, so to speak, because it’s still probably the most exciting and impressive debut of my life.

[outoflimbo]

seven years later and blackstar is still a masterpiece. lazarus is the most fucking heartbreaking song ever made

[leporellian]

darkstripe and/or sol for tha ask meme :]

darkstripe:

favorite thing about them: i’m a simple man i see a bad guy’s ineffectual goon and i go apeshit

least favorite thing about them: as with most warrior cats characters. The Wasted Potential of Exploration With Him

favorite line: when he said he was no cat’s lackey in alitm... girl that’s your brand

brOTP: longtail. also i wish we got to see him interact with more non thunderclan cats

OTP: nobody lol but if you held a gun to my throat i think him and stumpytail could be interesting

nOTP: i hate darktiger so much its unreal

random headcanon: i like to think he was the half clan son of willowpelt and some random shadowclan cat, and he idolized tigerclaw from a young age as a sort of overcompensation for it. nobody ever told him but he understood, it was obvious why they treated him like they did in his eyes

unpopular opinion: i think combining him and ravenpaw‘s characters (or at least swapping some of their traits) could be very interesting... could you imagine darkpaw being the one to say tigerclaw killed redtail and then as an adult denying he ever said anything so horrid about his beloved mentor. much 2 think about

song i associate with them: hard 2 say. let me think

favorite picture of them: i like how he looks here

sol:

favorite thing about them: haha its mephistopheles but like, pathetic and dumb

least favorite thing about them: nobody in the fandom acknowledges how pathetic he is. except for me and my mutuals (smart)

favorite line: when he starts kicking the earth and going “I CAN BE A WARRIOR!!!” in skyclan and the stranger... classic

brOTP: leafstar

OTP: ...blackstar. alternatively him and onestar would be funny

nOTP: idk i don’t think about warrior cats ships this hard

random headcanon: he’s a gay man and a lesbian and bisexual and transgender all at once. at the same time

unpopular opinion: why is he made out to be a master manipulator he’s so pathetic. i would tie him to a leash and then tie the leash to a car and then slam it down the dan ryan so fast so he bounces around in the pavement behind me (affectionate)

song i associate with them: dr worm by they might be giants for some reason

favorite picture of them: wheres that eclipse cover where he has a goatee. he really is just Pathetic Mephistopheles

[fandoms-spamdom]

2: If you could meet anyone on this earth, who would it be?3: Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 23, give me line 17.4: What do you think about most?5: What does your latest text message from someone else say?6: Do you sleep with or without clothes on?7: What’s your strangest talent?8: Girls… (finish the sentence); Boys… (finish the sentence)9: Ever had a poem or song written about you?

2 - I’d roll my mutuals into a big mutual ball and pass them off as a person. That person

3 - Unfortunately I don’t have a book on me BUT I do however have a fanfic from AO3. Paragraph 23:

“Why-” BlackStar cleared his throat. His voice still wasn’t being very cooperative. “Why me? You’ve got all manner of tough guys here, don’t you?”

4 - The little gay people in my phone

5 - “Up?” From my father

6 - With

7 - Uhhh my fingers are double jointed? Also my typing pattern memorization

8 - Girls 👧 Boys (my keyboard gave no suggestions -w-)

9 - Both :>

[warriorcatsofficialfacts]

The fact that the website really thought they could completely contradict what Vicky said about all of the characters [other than maple ofc] being in Starclan… they ain’t smart we know what they’re doing :/

I have DF Freckle AUs but I don’t believe she resides there, It’s stupid that the website thinks she does.

I suddenly got a burst of inspiration listening to Other Friends for an AU and I decided to roll with it. (That was 3weeks ago.) I had originally planned on making it a MAP but now that the website is behaving like this, it just doesn’t feel good anymore to make the MAP. I already have over half of the storyboard animated and I don’t know whether to continue with the AU or just post what I have and leave it as just a storyboard. I probably won’t continue with the MAP since I don’t really think the same as I did back then, my mind changes a lot. It would save me the stress too.

I’d much rather use my other au where Birchface gets her out of there and she is happy in heaven with the Hero&Villain Duet song. It’s much more wholesome and happy which she deserves, so I’ll most likely just scrap the MAP call for the Other Friends storyboard and do this one instead. Won’t make it a MAP still, unless people seem interested. I have a few other ideas for PMVs but those are for another day 🤣

Also Stumpytail shouldn’t be there either. As far as I know, his only crime was following Brokenstar (who was his mentor, of course he’s gonna follow him!) Why is he there??? I never really read the first arc, I just thrived off of spoilers, so correct me if I’m wrong 🤣

Sorry if I’m annoying or if I’m rambling too much, I always get paranoid when I think I’m being annoying so I apologize if I am :’>

i totally get what you mean about having villain/df freckle aus and kinda resenting them bc the website is Behaving this way. like my frecklewish doom guy comic Still gets notes and i Kinda wanna digitize it but at the same time ever since it turned out this wasn't a tech error and they really do just hate women that bad it feels kinda. poor taste? not really the right term but it just don't feel right

and yeah stumpytail being in the df is wild. especially when blackstar is in starclan and he was brokenstar stannie supreme

[knives-out20]

The Impact Of The Intergalactic - David Bowie Opinion Essay - by Beck S.

This is an essay I wrote about the span of David Bowie's career. I wrote it for a summer school course I took last year (August 2021) for a course called History of Rock & Roll.

My teacher gave nice feedback after he marked it, talking about how it was an "Excellent paper. It charts Bowie's progress throughout his career well, and includes significant detail. I could really feel the passion you have about him throughout. In fact, there is *too much* detail! The paper was supposed to be 3 pages max, double-spaced. Still, this is a good problem to have; better too much than too little."

So...enjoy!!

From his early works like Hunky Dory, to Black Tie White Noise in the 1990’s and stretching over to Blackstar as his final album, David Bowie has rarely had a bad album or song- in my opinion. His career has had ups and downs, his musical creations ranging in the way he would pitch his voice and what instruments he would use, the people he would produce with, and the wild things he would say. Charting David Bowie’s development over time is in fact an interesting journey.

Early on in his dreamy career, Bowie would have done nearly anything- or in fact, anyone- to grow in the music world. Hopping from band to band (like The Velvet Underground), producer to producer, doing whatever he could do to get ‘in’ in the industry. His early albums weren’t taken very highly in their times- especially with the ‘man-dress’ he wore on the British release of his The Man Who Sold The World album. Although, this dress was only the start of the androgynous appearance he would soon be known for, over the course of his 5-decade-spanning career.

The 1970’s were strange, to say the least. He married Angela Bowie at the start of the decade, then welcomed their son Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones a year later. Bowie went on to be hopped up on cocaine. David donned the look of one of his famous personas, The Thin White Duke. The same persona with slicked-back ginger hair, a white button-up under a black waistcoat and paired with black dress pants. The same Duke who called Adolf Hitler one of the first ‘rock stars’ and gave off a lot of faschist energy. He said many statements he’d later apologize for and grow as a better man from, which is good- it’s better than standing by then, or even backing himself up and supporting them. David Bowie called that period the darkest days of his life, and blamed the crazy statements on his horrid addiction and deteriorating mental state. The late 1970’s were more favorable, seeing as it gave the world what was dubbed the Berlin Trilogy alongside Brian Eno and David’s personal friend, Iggy Pop. Made up of three of his albums: Low and Heroes (both in 1977) and Lodger (1978). He moved from Los Angeles to Switzerland, then to Berlin as a further decision to escape his addiction (the reason he moved away from LA in the first place). It was in Berlin, of course, where he wrote his famous song Heroes, about two lovers, one from East Berlin and one from West.

Speaking of Berlin, David Bowie performed near the west of the Berlin Wall in 1987; he played so loud that crowds gathered on the east to listen. At this time, Bowie had no idea he would be the beginning of the city’s soon-coming unifying. After his death in 2016, the German government thanked him for bringing the wall down and unifying a divided Germany.

Music isn’t all he is known for, though it is a majority. He also starred in movies from time to time. Being the titular man in The Man Who Fell To Earth in 1976, Jareth the moody goblin king in Jim Henson’s 1986 Labyrinth film (what is most likely his most famous role), Monte the barman in the 1991 movie The Linguini Incident, cameoing as himself in Zoolander (2001), Nikola Tesla in the 2006 movie The Prestige, and even Lord Royal Highness in Spongebob Squarepants’ Atlantis Squarepantis in 2007, among a few others. David Bowie dabbled in the art of acting, and was not that bad at it. He was good enough to gain a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, too. Sometimes it bends my mind that my first introduction to my all-time favourite musician was in a Spongebob Squarepants movie, back before I knew who he was, but David Bowie was never one to shy away from foreshadowing. At least one song from many of his albums would hint at the direction he’d go in for his next release. For example, his track Queen Bitch on Hunky Dory foreshadowed his soon-coming Ziggy Stardust. And the Diamond Dogs track 1984 actually hinted at the Philadelphian soul of Young Americans, which is a more famous song of his, which he went on to perform on The Cher Show with its host.

The 1990’s were certainly an experimental time for David Bowie. But to my knowledge, I think the 1990’s was a time for everyone. He married supermodel Iman some days after performing at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, and released the album I named earlier, Black Tie White Noise. It is known to have had a prominent use of electronic instruments, as was his other 1990’s album, Earthling. The early 1990’s greeted David’s first real band since the Spiders From Mars, dubbed Tin Machine. They recorded three guitar-driven albums which received mixed reviews from the masses, but Bowie looks back at this period- as do I- with a certain fondness; “a glorious disaster” he called it, when talking to journalist Mick Brown. Tin Machine is a period I don’t listen to often, compared to his solo stuff, but I don’t press the skip button when it comes on.

Alas, the starman’s career drew to a close as the 2000s rolled in. David Bowie greeted the 2000’s with the birth of his and Iman’s daughter, the beautiful Alexandria Zahra Jones. After suffering a- strange, as it were- heart attack symptoms mid-song during a concert in 2004, he took a hiatus from his career. I say strange because given what I know, he was trying his best to stay healthy at the time. According to my special Rolling Stone edition magazine about David Bowie (released at the start of this year), he was on tour and performing in a really hot arena. But Bowie was sober, and had quit smoking. He was taking medication to lower his cholesterol, and worked out with a trainer. Bowie looked great, and yet he felt a pain in his shoulder and chest, along with a shortness for breath. A bodyguard rushed onstage to usher Bowie off of it, cutting the concert short. He only performed live once or twice after that point, but was set on never going live ever again. And he kept his word on that, unfortunately but also fortunately. Unfortunately, because David Bowie live would have been quite the experience- I wouldn’t know, personally. But fortunately, because I do not believe anyone needs a repeat of the 2004 Reality scare.

I am actually not too fond of speaking of his final years. Nobody really likes to speak of the last years of their idols’ life before their death, so it’s no surprise. Blackstar was David Bowie’s 25th and final album, recorded entirely in secret in New York alongside his long-time producer, Tony Visconti. The album's central theme lyrically is mortality, and seeing as Bowie was undergoing chemotherapy for his cancer at the time, I see it as his way of coping with his incoming death. His producer Tony Visconti called him a ‘canny bastard’, when he realized Bowie was essentially writing a farewell album. Every song on the album is what is considered a swan song, a swan song in question being a phrase for a final gesture of some sort before retirement or death. In this case, death. Over the course of recording the album, David Bowie’s chemotherapy had actually been working and he had an eerie optimism while recording. But by the time they shot the two music videos Blackstar and Lazarus, where he showed off the definite passage of time and cruelty of chemotherapy through sparse and gray hair with sagging skin, he knew his condition was terminal and that this would be a battle he would lose. Blackstar wasn’t the first album to have been made by a musician succumbing to a fatal illness, but in my opinion it is in fact the most beautiful. It’s jazzy, and elegant, showing how at peace he had become with dying.

Blackstar the album was released on January 8th, 2016. Also known as David Bowie’s 69th birthday. Two days later, David Bowie died at his Lafayette Street home on January 10th after living with liver cancer for up to 18 months. Beforehand, he had let it be known he did not want a funeral nor a burial, but rather that his body be cremated and the ashes to be scattered in Bali by his loved ones. His wish was received, and planet Earth was very much bluer and quieter without his colour and wonderful noise.

As I said earlier on, David Bowie’s career came with ups and downs. His mysteriously close relationship with Mick Jagger, his cross with famous underage groupie Lori Maddox, the births of his two talented children, his faschist bender in the 70’s, and final bang of Blackstar in his final year on earth. Through the highs and lows, his career and his music meant a lot to the quote-unquote misfits and freaks of the world, myself included. David Bowie turned and faced the strange, shouted “you’re not alone!” To those who felt the loneliest, he surely spent his career helping those who needed to be themselves, feel more freer and braver in doing so, no matter what they may be when they are themselves. He never went boring, he never went stale, he sang what he wanted and dressed how he pleased, and kept to his word on how much more to life there is when you’re just that; yourself. A year after David Bowie’s untimely passing, his son Duncan Jones accepted an award for British album of the year that was won by Blackstar at the 37th annual Brit Awards. When he accepted it, he made a speech about his father that I will leave here, and never forget. Seeing as it perfectly encapsulates David Bowie’ legacy, and the true meaning of his extraordinary career.

“I lost my dad last year, but I also became a dad. And, uhm, I was spending a lot of time- after getting over the shock- of trying to work out what would I want my son to know about his granddad? And I think it would be the same thing that most of my dad's fans have taken over the last 50 years. That he’s always been there supporting people who think they’re a little bit weird or a little bit strange, a little bit different, and he’s always been there for them. So...this award is for all the kooks, and all the people who make the kooks. Thanks, Brits, and thanks to his fans.” - Duncan Z. H. Jones (February 22 2017, at The O2 Arena in London.)

[ars-historia-est]

When Spirituality met Rock

- Jim Morrison visits Teotihuacan, México in 1969. A deeply spiritual and philosophical artist, his idiosyncratic and mystifying stage presence led the "Doors" to performances best described as "shamanic" and "ritualistic", while he always exhibited an atavistic interest for the ancient energies of the desert and America's indigenous folklore and spirituality.

- The final sequence of Ken Russell's "Tommy" (1975), based on The Who's 1969 album of the same name, about a deaf, dumb and blind youth who creates a rock religion around his person, only to be rejected and reject it all by the end, and finally attain personal enlightenment and self-knowledge. Pete Townshend, The Who's main creative force, was deeply inspired by the teachings of spiritual master Meher Baba. "The Who" vocalist Roger Daltrey in the lead role.

-  A fan prays in a Led Zeppelin concert (March 7th 1970,Montreux). Led Zeppelin's performing of wildly melodic and alternately aggressive and tender compositions, suffused with untamed sexual energy best exemplified by singer Robert Plant's seductive stage persona, guitarist Jimmy Page's sensuous playing and the duo's electrifying interaction, has often been described as "orgiastic", "ecstasy-inducing" and "Dionysian".

- Ed Caraeff's (in)famous photo of Jimi Hendrix setting his Strat on fire in Monterey Pop Festival, 1967. The photo defined an era, appeared twice in the Rolling Stone and became one the most iconic photos of Hendrix and rock culture in general. While the stunt may have been born of managerial executive meddling to "help" the performer hold his own among the audience-shocking antics of bands like "The Who", Jimi said in relation to the incident: "The time I burned my guitar it was like a sacrifice. You sacrifice the things you love. I love my guitar."

- David Bowie's connection between his music and spirituality was not that flamboyant or obvious, but it was much more enduring. Bowie, famous for his adoption of different "personas" at various points of his career, each with its own distinctive look, mannerisms and personality, was deeply interested in the religious and the occult. Each and every one of his guises and musical endeavors incorporated in small or large quantities, obviously or subtextually, a wealth of mystical and esoteric symbolism in accordance with his spiritual explorations at the time, and he never shied away from challenges and controversy. One of his most defining spiritual endeavors was his interest in the Kabbalah, which, after decades, culminated in his last album "Blackstar".

- The famous pop-art print by Andy Warhol of the 1967 portrait photograph of Beatle George Harrison by Richard Avedon, depicting him performing the Abhaya Mudrā, representing protection, peace, benevolence, and the dispelling of fear. The 1960s saw a previously-unseen turn to eastern philosophies and religions, in the context of the "hippy" movement and the general social and mental unrest engendered by the need for personal and communal redefinition of the first post-war generation. Many musicians, chief among them the Beatles, headlined this turn to the East, travelling to India, incorporating Hindu instruments and melodies in their songs and socializing with local spiritual figures. Though it boosted amazingly the art and thought of the West, along with opening new communication routes and familiarizing the people with hitherto unknown cultures or parts thereof, leading to a new and much-deserved appreciation and study thereof, the whole tendency crashed and oftentimes proved itself rather superficial, self-indulgent and ignorant, to the point of being considered a joke today more often than not. George Harrison, however, was one the relatively few who truly found a new way they would follow all their lives. He became a devoted Hinduist, incorporated seamlessly his new religion in his way of life, familiarized himself with his new spiritual homeland's culture and history, collaborated and introduced the West to many Asian musicians, one of the most famous being musical legend Ravi Shankar, who also taught him to play the sitar. He, especially in his successful solo career, often expressed religious sentiment through his music, at times using it as a form of prayer, putting in this way his musical talent in service to his faith (e.g. "My Sweet Lord"). What's more, he didn't stop there, but exhibited an engaged and active interest for South Asia in times where their relationships with the rest of the world, and especially Britain, were strained. The most historic of these cases was his organization, along with Ravi Shankar, of the "Concert for Bangladesh", to raise awareness and funds for the struggling-to-be-liberated country. It was the first ever benefit event of such a scale, inadvertedly creating a musical institution that till today transcends musical genres and unites philanthropy and art.

[evilform]

soup eater, Gimme the works (all of the)m

AUTISM ACTIVATED. ok fuck this is gonna be long. under the cut it goes

📃 what is the plot of your hyperfixation? and is it a movie, game, show, etc?

😔 i am an anime enjoyer sadly enough. theres also the manga but i havent read that SO im just gonna be focusing on the anime for this one. uhhh (digging through my brain) none of this is going to be worded intelligently im sorry give me a moment.

there are these kids and some of them can turn into weapons. actually theres just weapon people in general and thats like Normal. dont ask too many lore questions. and they uhhh the kids go to a high school called the DWMA (lit. demon weapon-meister academy) focused on keeping the balance between good and evil. i uhhhhh

The anime is based on the Soul Eater manga series by Atsushi Ohkubo. The plot of the episodes follows Maka Albarn, a "meister" of the Death Weapon Meister Academy (DWMA), and her living weapon, Soul Eater, as she seeks to make the latter into a "death scythe" through absorbing the souls of evil humans.

thanks wikipedia

📌  how did you find your hyperfixation?

uhhh if im not mistaken an old friend introduced me to it back in 2018!! (hi holly the chances of you reading this are slim but hi) and it recently bubbled back up into my brain. ive been here for 2 years :heart:

✨  what draws you towards your hyperfixation? what is interesting about it?

i think that drew me towards it initially was the very halloweeny, early 2000s feel to it (and.. fair enough, it WAS made in 2008-2009 so its authentic) but what kept me reeled in was a lot of the themes and symbolism that i am waayy too tired to get into rn but i am just telling you bro this anime hits.. a little deep

and also canon nonbinary (even if shoddily translated at first) and psychotic characters win

🎥 do you have any favorite scenes from your hyperfixation?

i DO but i am keeping this spoiler free for you wife. these are all tearjerkers anyways so

🎶  if your hyperfixation has songs/an ost, what is your favorite song from it?

just one? 🥺 honestly the anime’s entire OST goes hard as hell and its super hard picking favorites but here:

LOTUS JUICE - PSYCHEDELIC SOULJAM DJ SHINYA - NEVER LOSE MYSELF LOTUS JUICE - STEP UP

and this one isnt part of the ost butttt....

CHIAKI OMIGAWA/KOKI UCHIYAMA - SOUL EATER CHARACTER SONG (Soul&Maka) - MAUVE IRO NO SYMPATHY

💕  tell us about one of your favorite characters and why you like them!

i could say crona and talk about their character development and how much i see myself in them and how we share the same trauma. or i could say maka and talk about HER character development and how i see myself in her in the sense of always trying to be good enough and pushing her limits to be strong and resilient in the face of everything. or i could say stein and go in depth about how hes written as a psychotic character while still not letting that define his entire being and how much i see myself in HIM. or i could talk about kid and liz and patti a

💔  tell us about one of your LEAST favorite characters and why you dislike them.

🏳‍🌈  do you have any headcanons (lgbt, race, neuro, etc) that are important to you?

lesbian maka, trans/intersex/nonbinary/lesbian crona, transmasc blackstar, nonbinary kid... literally all of these kids are neurodivergent (i see myself in them moment part 3845875)

🍀  do you have any kins or comfort characters from your hyperfixation?

that’s a little personal don’tcha think?

all jokes aside i don’t think i “kin” but uhhhh. honestly most these characters are comfort characters to me. soul eater in general is comfort media

💎  are there any fun facts or trivia that you would like to share?

*does a silly little dance* OHKAY!

none of the soul eater games (there were 3 of them) were ever released outside of japan

black☆star is voiced by women in both the jp and eng dubs

maka was chiaki omigawa’s first VA role

💢  what do you NOT like about your hyperfixation? is there something you would want to change about it?

this isnt anime specific and i am thinking heavily of the manga crona boobage weirdness but every time atsushi ohkubo writes something weird with these characters i feel like this image. it fills me with primal rage

anyways thanks for listening this took me over an hour to write amd i kept bouncing around my room because i am so autistic and this series makes me so happy

[curious-minx]

October 2010s Music Deep Dive!

A mock up poster for the only possible music festival line-up I would be willing to risk my life attending. Tony Allen’s passing has caused the entire Octoberfest to be cancelled indefinitely, but all proceeds from ticks will be given back to the community. 

Hope all of you special nobodies and overblown somebodies reading this right now are having a smashing start your first o November. All last month I had taken it upon myself to listen to as many albums and fragments of albums released sometime during the month of October spanning the entire 10’s decade, 2010 through 2019. This is all probably a result of drinking too much dead water, Quarantine brain, undiagnosed Autism, magical thinking and the death of boredom. I have created a Spotify playlist sporting 25 hours and 4 minutes worth of music with an arbitrary amount of albums getting multiple songs, but largely one song/album. This project did create a sense of madness because of the volume of music that gets cranked out. How can we expect anyone to properly criticize music when it is nearly impossible to keep up with it all? I largely culled these albums from Allmusic’s Editorial Choice section, but I did have to use Rateyourmusic to fill out the hip-hop and R&B gaps. In gathering up all of this music I am attempting to see if spooky music was relegated to the October season and any other possible trends. Even though October has been laid to rest her swelling calendar breast still contains a treasure trove of music worth discussing. Grab your broom, sharpen your heels and get the cobwebs out of your ears because we’re going on a Deep Dive! 

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The 2010s Old Souls and Musical Auteurs 

I consider any musician or band that endures more than a decade worthy of this veteran label. Music biz lifers seem found solace in the October release schedule. A trend that has carried onto the new decade with October 2020 offering revitalized releases by Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen reunited with the E Street Band. All three main members of Sonic Youth, Moore, Gordon and Renaldo are still harnessing that spooky Bad Moon Rising energy and carrying it over into their solo releases. 

KIM GORDON’s NO RECORD HOME

The first truly proper solo album by Kim Gordon following up her pretty good noise rock releases under the Body/Head moniker with Bill Nace. No Record Home towers over Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo’s mostly okay solo releases because of how truly experimental and refreshingly modern sounding No Record Home is. This album sounds like it could easily have come out from a young Pacific Northwest Trip-Angle (RIP) label upstart. Instead, Gordon is defiantly aging gracefully and remains an all around important feminist voice in experimental rock music. No Record Home did not pop up on a lot of “Best of the Year” lists in 2019, nor did Gordon embark on any kind of touring for the release. I am hoping that more people will eventually discover this great album and realize that Gordon was truly the best, most truly experimental aspect of Sonic Youth. Her vocals on this album are the best she’s ever sounded because she built these songs and sounds with the intergral collaborator, producer Justin Raisen. A glimpse at Raisen’s Wikipedia page is a who’s who of great artists of the past decade: Yves Tumor, Charli XCX, and Sky Ferreira. The collaboration occurred at an AirBnB shared between Gordon and Raisen and birthed the first single of the project “Air BnB.” A song that completely sets the tone of the album and features one of those amazing music videos in the same line us Young Thug’s “Wyclef Jean. “

Björk - Biophilia

Can you name the last album the rolled out with its own app? Nine years have come and gone and I certainly can’t think of another album with such wholesome ambitions. Björk was getting passionate about ecological concerns in her native Icelandic home with Sigur Ros and using her sphere of influence to try to good. 2014 the app has found a permanent home in the MOMA, but outside of this curio status the album itself is still a worthwhile addition to the Björk canon. Biophilia finds Björk in musical scientist mode using sounds captured from a Tesla coil and making a whole musical universe onto herself. The rest of the 2010s found Björk going for bigger and more ambitious projects that continue to frustrate those who wish she would go back to her poppier roots. She remains one of those most consistent solo artists around and someone no one will be able to predict what she does next. The only thing is certain is that it will be visionary and will probably include a wildly ambitious rollout and a new piece of physical art like Biophilia’s $800 tuning forks.

NENEH CHERRY - BROKEN POLITICS

Featuring production duties for the second time from Four Tet (who also pops up in the October playlist with his 2013 album Beautiful Rewind). Broken Politics in Cherry’s words, “is about feeling broken, disappointed, and sad, but having perseverance. It’s a fight against the extinction of free thought and spirit.” The music video for single “Natural Skin Deep” was filmed in Beirut, a backdrop made even more painful given 2020’s Explosion. Cherry is an artist with deep spiritual and blood connections with artists central to jazz’s history. Broken Politics also features songs built around Ornette Coleman samples. This is all to say that Neneh Cherry is always going to be someone tapping into a creative cosmic vein that spans generations, and with that comes a hard wisdom. Two years later we’re still dealing with the same god damn guts and guns of history. 

OTHER NOTABLES:

(Cat Power - The Wanderer; John Cale - Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood; Tony Allen - Film of Life ; Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Psychedelic Pill ;Bryan Ferry - Olympia; Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Ghosteen ;Yoko Ono - Warzone; Vashti Bunyan - Heartleap; Elvis Costello & The Imposters - Look Now; The Chills - Silver Bullets; Weezer - Everything Will Be Alright In The End;Laurie Anderson - Heart of A Dog;Janet Jackson - Unbrekable;The Mercury Rev - Light In You;  Rocketship - Thanks To You; Van Dyke Parks & Gaby Moreno - Spangled; Donald Fagen - Sunken Condos; Prefab Sprout - Crimson Red; Pere Ubu - 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo; Negativland - True False )

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TRILOGY OF BLACKSTARS

Three last albums released by three titans of 20th century songwriting. Two of them follow the trajectory of an older artist getting rejuvenated by a younger backing band. Lulu is beyond a meme at this point and is considered one of the most confounding flops since Metallic Music. Like Metallic Music, Lulu will get a reappraisal and find its audience. Mr. Blackstar himself Bowie considered  Lulu one of his favorite releases. “Junior Dad” alone makes this album a worthy addition in Lou Reed’s discography. Scott Walker invited some similarly hairy and intense younger rock studs into his private castle and pulls off a far more natural combination. Soused fits like a velvet glove on a elegant corpse hand swirling thick slabs of guitar and demonic percussion. Scott Walker effortlessly orchestrates between elegance and moribundity whereas Lulu wallows and thrashes against  the ugly riffage. 

No riffs or oozing wall of sound are  anywhere to be found on the sparse and pointedly elegiac You Want it Darker. Leonard Cohen never went full on sleazy I’m Your Man ever again but he didn’t become adult contemporary either. You Want It Darker finds Leonard and his son Adam Cohen. When Leonard passed away he was the only one to get a full David Bowie like museum tribute, Lou Reed only got a corner of a library. Cohen is far and away the most accessible mystical Jewish Buddhist monk with a penchant for fedoras and having a masked man with a leather belt beat him in the recording booth [citation needed]. You Want It Darker is the only one of these mortality laden kiss offs to win a Grammy. I do wonder if Cohen would have ever allowed a more adventurous production to touch his staid and timeless old fashioned sound. Tom Scharpling divides Leonard Cohen into his Pre-Fedora and Post-Fedora days. If you are being literal about that demarcation that still gives you a pretty vast body of music I just want sad bloated blurry black and white Leonard Cohen with a banana or the smiling cad on Songs of Love and Hate. Even the floppy fedora era has worthwhile albums and he sounds like if Serge Gainsbourgh was a muppet Gargoyle, he’s reliable. I will always beat myself for not buying that official Leonard Cohen raincoat at the Jewish Museum Leonard Cohen exhibit, but I hope someone has and they are finding comfort with Cohen’s music. A lot of his latter day period is comforting in a sardonic sexy mind bending nursing home sort of way. 

I am glad that these men were ultimately spared from having to deal with Covid times and even someone as tasteless as Brian Wilson’s Ghost can acknowledge that it’s more important than ever to keep your elderly loved ones locked away in a well ventilated pod. 

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(INSERT ARTIST HERE) SEASON

For a few sticky sweet select few artists the month of October proved to be a suitable release launch pad for more than one album. The Mountain Goats and clipping. have just joined the October two-timer club this year. The reigning queen of October releases is Taylor Swift and Adrianne Lenker. In chronological order swift released Speak Now, Red and 1989 probably Swift’s biggest run in terms of critical and commercial success. None of these albums have a particularly big place in my heart, in fact speaking on behalf of Brian Wilson’s Ghost Ltd. I’m not the biggest fan of America’s Sweetheart, Sweet Tea Poet Laureate.  All three of these albums all came out in the latter part of October and based on the Target brand synergy roll-out felt as inevitable as pumpkin spice. Haunted. Sad Beautiful Tragic. Out of the Woods. These are either song titles taken from these three albums are the names of the under utilized Romantic Halloween Horror Comedy genre. Lady Gaga might have been spooking it up on American Horror Story, but Swift gives a far more chilling performance in Tom Hooper’s midnight madness of Cats and I could envision Swift excelling really well as a horror film actor. Especially in a role like Scarlett Johansson’s Under the Skin. 

You cannot get more polar opposite from Swift than Adrianne Lenker. Who released her first solo album abysskiss   and the second Big Thief album of 2019 Two Hands. Lenker will have also gone on to make her third October release this year with her second solo album songs & instrumentals. Striking that such a ghostly autumnal band would have only released one album in October, but autumnal feeling albums are not beholden to release calendars. The song “Not” from the Big Thief album Two Hands is a watershed breakthrough moment for the band and put Lenker and her band on the map. In 2019 Big Thief became a band that could get booked onto a Goodmorning American performance slot and more or less made Big Thief one of the rare 2010s indie bands to become more or less a household name. 

Other notable artists to have released more than one album on October 2010s:

Less notable artists to have multiple October releases: James Blunt Korn

Calvin Harris 

Kings of Leon

Pentatonix 

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FORMER HARBINGERS OF HYPE

These are October releases from artists that once felt like whenever they put out an album a wider array of outlets and publications seemed to care more and would spill more digital ink over them. The big three artists that had the biggest drop off in attention and acclaim that stick out to me the most are Titus Andronicus,  Justice and Why? All three artists debuted with strong starts back in the aughts, but according to critical reception more or less crashed and burned. Titus Andronicus’ Local Business was one of the last times Titus Andronicus would get positive marks from Pitchfork. Local Business a fun and shaggy follow-up to one of the most self-serious concept albums of the 2010s. 

Justice’s Audio, Video, Disco similarly is a follow up to a highly acclaimed album that set the bar high enough to doom Justice into never living up to the hype. Justice’s 2007 s/t heralded them as the next Daft Punk, but unlike those soulful and thoughtful robots Justice mainly wanted to make big ridiculous unfashionable synth prog rock. Audio, Video, Disco is simply cheesy fun and even though we live in a world better off without parties and gatherings this album helps you feel like you are in high-def IMAX monster mash on the moon. 

The leaves us with Why?’s Mump’s Etc. an album that already had the job of following up an already divisive follow up record Eskimo Snow. Why’s Alopecia is a really important 2008 indie blog rap album that helped thrust the online indie blogs into the hip-hop genre hybrid experimentalism. Why? would never make another universally beloved album again and with Mump’s Etc. ended up permanently in Pitchfork’s hate pit. In the original release review the Pitchfork writer essentially deems this album an act of “career suicide.” The whole review is essentially an assignation of Why?’s figurehead Yoni Wolf and taking him to task for all of his awkward lyrical blunders and the fact he is narcissistic enough to be a musician writing about his career in a meta fashion. Yet when I listen to Mump’s Etc. I am more or less enjoying Yoni Wolf’s personality and find the whole thing to be pretty charming. A perfectly serviceable 3.5/5 release that a media outlet like Pitchfork turns into a flexing opportunity to show how that they have the power to make or break a career. 

A.C. Newman, an artist who appears on this playlist with his terrific 2012 Shut Down The Streets took to Twitter to scoff at the idea that a good Pitchfork review has done anything for his career. Shut Down The Streets currently remains the last solo album Newman has released under his name choosing to focus on his main gig with the New Pornographers. The Internet based hype machine is even more ADHD addled and twitchier by the day. The joy of doing this deep dive allowed me to revisit a lot of these artists and acts that I had fallen out of touch with. I had completely forgotten about King of Convenience’s Erlend Øye who released the album Legao in 2014. I rediscovered a good deal of bands like the Editors, The Dodos, Kisses, Black Milk, Crocodiles, Empire of the Sun, Juana Molina, Jagwar Ma, Here We Go Magic, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr., YACHT, Peaking Lights, The Twilight Sad, Elf Power, Swet Shop Boys, Radio Dept, Allo’ Darlin, Foxes In Fiction, and HOMESHAKE are all bands not trying to change the world or challenge listeners with avant garde experimentation. Instead I feel like I maintaining relationships with old friends on the edge of obscurity. 

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A HISTORY OF CHRISTMAS IN OCTOBER 

A tradition stretching back as far as 2014 not October’s Idina Menzel’s Holiday Wishes, but Seth McFarland’s Holiday For Swing sweatily released on CD, digital, and vinyl on September 30, 2014.  2015 then brings us a Chris Tomlin and Ru Paul Christmas albums because every force of Neo-liberal good must be balanced with evangelical contemporary Christian music *shutters.* 2016 finds the Christmas in October era reaching a complete and utter nadir with R. Kelly’s final official LP 12 Nights of Christmas and A Pentatonix Christmas, but also buffered by Kacey Musgrave’s Christmas. 2017 only had time for Gwen Stefani’s You Make It Feel Like Christmas and no one else could evoke this feeling in October. On 2018, Michelle and Barack Obama’s combined one and only Christmas wish comes true, no not cancelling those drone strikes, but getting John Legend to join the October release jamboree; Eric Clapton claps open his guitar’s butt cheeks and hatefully squats out a half assed Xmas album defiantly opening the album with “White Christmas” [eyeroll emoji]; and finally 2018 found the Pentatonix announcing in October that Christmas Is Here. I apologize for all of that crude butt talk about the hateful racist Eric Clapton, but(t) I have festive gluteus Maximus on the mind, because in 2019 Norah Jones got her alternative country gal trio back together to remind us to shake our Christmas butts. Eat shit commercial shit, today’s Santa’s birthday! That’s the magic of the October release schedule! 

The hallowed Christmas in October tradition continues on in 2020 with Dolly I-Beg-Thee-Pardon  releasing A Holly Dolly Christmas right on time on October 2, 2020 (Carrie Underwood missed the memo and unwraps her unwanted My Gift in September 2020). Meghan Trainor, Goo Goo Dolls, and Tori Kelly released Christmas albums. Can you believe Seth MacFarlane comes up twice in this article, because his sleazy J. Michigan Frog croon is processed and grated like Parmesan cheese snow flakes all over a rendition of White Christmas.  What a time to be alive! 

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WHERE DID THEY GO?

A Brief Case For Class Actress’s Rapproacher

Among my October music travels I encountered one artist that really impressed me with her proper LP debut Rapprocher. The trio fronted by Elizabeth Vanessa Harper is essentially peddling the kind of competent moody 80’s inspired synth pop that belongs on a lost Donnie Darko sequel. Harper’s vocals are striking and expressive and they are melded with constantly propulsive bed of shiny synths and glossy barely-there gated percussion. Outside of an 2015  EP called Movies featuring exciting production contributions from Italo-disco icon Giorgio Moroder there has been nothing else from Class Actress. Highly recommend you check them out especially if you want to find the sweet spot between Chromatics and Kylie Minogue. 

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THE OCTOBER 2010s MASTERPIECES 

(Robyn - Honey, Big K.R.I.T. - 4eva is a Mighty Long Time  ,Miguel -  Kaleidoscope Dream, Crying - Beyond The Fleeting Gale , M83 Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming ,SRSQ - Unreality, Sufjan Stevens - age of adz, Joanna Newsom - divers, VV Brown Samson and Delilah, Kelela - tear me apart , Neon Indian - VEGA Intl., Fever Ray - Plunge , Antony and The Johnsons - Swanlights (goodbye album) , Caroline Polachek - Pang , Sky Ferreira - Night Time, My Time . Bat For Lashes  Haunted Man, James Ferraro - Far Side Virtual , Grouper -  Ruins , Kero Kero Bonito -Bonito Generation , DJ Rashad - Double Cup)

Maybe if I surround this VV Brown album with more well known artists she’ll finally get some more clicks? I should also mention that Joanna Newsom’s Divers is nowhere on my Spotify October Music playlist because Joanna Newsom thinks Spotify is bananas, and she hates bananas. I know I should also mention Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city and Tame Impala’s Lonerism. That’s the maddening thing about October music that just when you think you covered all your ground you find another hidden hump underneath the carpet.  I feel remiss without mentioning striking debut and instant hidden gem Tinashe’s Aquarius, which did you know has a new album art on Spotify. Death Grip’s No Love Deep Web. T_T I didn’t even get around to making a big verbal mosaic to Thom Yorke’s witchy Suspiria soundtrack.Corpus Christi! I forgot to highlight The Orb album in the collage with my other veteran artists!  As you can see this project nearly ruined me. I did not necessarily listen to all of these albums from front to back, but I did listen all of the songs on the playlist and chose them from the immense collection of October releases. I am pretty sure this is the kind of content for no one in particular but I really needed to get it out of my system. Let’s meet back up October 2030!!!!!

(Thank you to my beloved partner, best friend and Spotify provider Maddie Johnson XD)

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7sdLaNNaqWpKEKXRZ3jNqY?si=SLZxUwLMQYOQ5wA1xuZc7w

[quarantineroulette]

20 Favorites from the 2010s

Happy New Year! I could only rescue 20 albums from the 2010s, there are the 20(ish - I doubled up on some) I would carry into the 2020s with me. May this act as your soundtrack on the lazy, hungover day that is January 1st. 

20) Rihanna: Anti-

19) The National: Sleep Well Beast. Still not the hugest The National fan, but I have huge respect for any band that can nearly bring drunken Irishmen to tears, which actually happened when we played “Dark Side of the Gym” in a bar last year. 

18) Leonard Cohen: You Want it Darker .

17) Ahnoni - Hopelessness .

16) Ariel Pink - Dedicated to Bobby Jameson . 13 weird pop gems that are all definitely #1 hits in some alternate, better reality. 

15) Omni - Deluxe . 

14) FFS - FFS . Funny, smart, and touching, this is the “feel good” album of the decade for me. It’s astonishing that Sparks are still doing new things this late into their career, and this is perhaps example #1 in an argument for why they should never stop. And has there ever been a better or more gleeful anthem for misanthropes than “Piss Off”?

13) Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell!! / Ultraviolence 

12) Danny Brown - Atrocity Exhibition . More stressful than a Safdie Brothers film.

11) Purple Mountains - Purple Mountains

10) David Bowie - Blackstar . I remember James telling me he almost woke me up in the middle of the night & said to me, “Maria, David Bowie died. What are we going to do?” I still don’t know what we’re doing. 

9) Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp a Butterfly / DAMN. We all know that pretty much everything Kendrick does is brilliant, but to choose just one, I’ll go with “HUMBLE.” and its video in particular. I C O N I C

8) Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Skeleton Tree . “Girl in Amber” = best Nick song of the 2010s. I won’t be discussing this further. 

7) Fiona Apple - The Idler Wheel… . Raw, beautifully sparse, and far greater a risk than it ever needed to be. I can’t think of an album from the past decade that was more singular. 

6) Moonface - Julia with Blue Jeans On . “November 2011” is a Nick Cave-caliber love ballad, and the whole album sounds like it was composed by a deranged, fur-clad poet sitting in a room filled with frayed paperbacks and nothing else. 

5) The Antlers - Burst Apart . My tastes are suspect at times, but I honestly cannot believe this was excluded from the major end-of-decade music lists. Perhaps the trio’s most unique, mature, and consistent release. A respite from the trauma of Hospice but not yet at the same level of peace as Familiars, but heck, all three are fucking tremendous. 

4) Protomartyr - Relatives in Descent . I really don’t know what I can say about Protomartyr, because all my praise of them is so effusive that you won’t believe that any band could be so perfect. But guess, what, they are and Relatives in Descent is a flawless record. I don’t understand how Greg Ahee isn’t being praised to the heavens for his staggering guitar playing, and Joe Casey is of course an all-around great, a poet and genius frontman -- a brilliant concoction of Nick Cave, Mark E Smith, and woke, Midwestern Dad. 

3) Suede - Night Thoughts / The Blue Hour . I can tell you in absolute seriousness that Night Thoughts changed my life. It made me overcome fears, introduced me to new friends, and distracted me from the drudgery of everyday life. Sometimes I sing “I Don’t Know How to Reach You” to myself as I search for missing books at work, and nine times out of 10 this method somehow works. The Blue Hour wasn’t as pivotal to me, but albumwise it was even bolder and more ridiculous, so it’s still earned my eternal respect. It also partially led to me befriending one of my favorite authors, so flying many miles to see this band and be in the presence of my other fave woke Dad seems pretty well justified to me. There may have been more relevant records in the 2010s, but none were as personally significant to me as these, and that’s worth all the relevance in the world.  2) Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest . Any album with a song inspired by a Dennis Cooper short story is going to rate very highly on a list by me. That the song, “Helicopter,” also happens to be my favorite single of the 2010s is just a bonus. Holding a well-justified classic status means there’s little I can say about Halcyon that hasn’t already been said. These songs will live on long after we’re all dead, and future alien races will still be worshipping “Coronado” in all its sax-laden glory. Dark, dreamy brilliance. 

1) PJ Harvey - Let England Shake / The Hope Six Demolition Project . We all (hopefully) know that Let England Shake is a work of art, but where is the love for Hope Six? I honestly don’t think I’ve ever heard anything quite like it, yet it sounds like a pure PJ record all the same: the bluesy-ness (here melded with saxes and martial drumming), the Flood co-production, PJ’s peerless vocals. Sometimes the songs take on the qualities of battle hymns yet carry a fierce and critical political undertones. Two records of bold, wholly unique protest music done with the focus and care that so much politlcal music - and politics in general - overlooks. And they somehow sound even better with each listen. If I have one wish for this new decade, it’s that everything will be more like this in every sense. And if we can’t have that, there will at least hopefully be another equally brilliant PJ record instead. 

[thesarosperiod]

the best situations to listen to david bowie songs in

okay so this is a list i’m compiling based on personal experience and i will be explaining my reasons for every choice. (if this gets notes i’ll make a part two.) feel free to reblog and add on!

lazarus: i already touched on it in a past post, but during a thunderstorm is the ONLY listening experience i will accept for this song now. something about the little saxophone bits and the lyrics “look up here, i’m in heaven” coinciding with pouring rain and lightning just strikes a chord in my soul, you know?

blackstar: while sleep deprived. seriously. i listened to this at three am once and it felt like i was unlocking the secrets of the universe itself. david bowie’s genius can only be fully felt during the ungodly hours of the night and i will not change my position on this, ever.

space oddity: first thing in the morning. i’m talking seven am at the latest. when it’s still night-chilly outside and that bit of dawn fog hangs in the air, the magic of “ground control to major tom” is somehow intensified times one thousand. i don’t understand it, and frankly i don’t want to because it WORKS.

rock ‘n’ roll suicide: there are many applications to this song, but i think the best is listening to it right before you go to sleep. lay in bed with some fairy lights on, under the covers, and let david’s gorgeous “oh no, love, you’re not alone” sing you to sleep. leads to a peaceful night every time.

heroes: when you’re sad, especially when you feel stressed or frustrated, this song is the most helpful thing. something about the phrase “we can be heroes, just for one day” makes me feel so much better. it’s is uplifting but not overly upbeat and can ease me out of a bad mood so well! highly recommended.

under pressure: when you’re feeling super satisfied and energetic. nothing, i repeat, NOTHING, invigorates me as much as pantomiming dramatically to “keep coming up with love but it’s so slashed and torn.” the more bowie the pantomime, the better. let the good vibes FLOW.

ashes to ashes: while working or doing homework. bonus points if you’re writing an essay or write-up. this song TRIPLES my productivity. as soon as it comes on my bowie playlist i’m in the zone, baby! thank you david for blessing us with the one (1) song that can crank my work ethic up instantly.