Check it – I’ve finally settled on a specific project to work on long-term and it’s called Verin Mathwin, after the WoL character (for reasons, no spoilers). It’s equal parts industrial, glitch, drum n bass, and synthwave, so if any of that appeals to you feel free to start streaming the album embedded above. Get hype.
The end came much as we expected, with our hands around each others throats, scrambling madly for the last dried-out crumbs. Overhead the vultures circle thirstily, their sleek silver machines hanging suspended in the rarefied air.
More Verin Mathwin
at the jetty we can see the wind
blowing out to stir the sailboat’s cloth
nothing lives outside the stress-torn sand
we live on, shoulder to shoulder at the
end of a roiling eternity
we didn’t mean to set the forest on fire
the great deserts in the center of it all
stand mute proof to the foolishness of
apologies and apologia and all apologism
Good evening. Here is new Verin Mathwin.
lime and limpet lovelies
lay adorned upon the sea
and every mother’s ugly was
a gorgeous sight to me
there’s a mall beside the breakwater
stripped into the wind
the ocean is a rolling thunder
salt spray, scarred in skins
Irrepressible, off-the-wall, and more than a little absurd, indie musician (Sandy) Alex G has made a career out of two things since dropping his debut in 2014: being as prolific as Ty Segall and being even more willing to play whatever the hell has come into his head in the last five minutes. House of Sugar marks his first album not put together in his bedroom but it keeps the manic, playlist-on-shuffle feel of his previous music. There’s just MORE of it – more instruments, more voices, more ideas.
Teen pop phenoms are almost always obnoxious – Donny Osmond and Justin Beiber were both awful in their own special ways. 2019’s teen pop phenom, Billie Eilish, manages to avoid this through the virtue of being really ridiculously good. Someone online – I forget who – called her ASMR pop and there’s a lot to that, really. Her style is like she took the mic into her closet and whispered her darkest secrets into it; these Whisper confessions were then laced over solid arrangements that both embrace and subvert pop conventions. An insane debut for a 17 year old, and a harbinger of big things to come.
Hot Chip have put out their fair share of mediocre songs, but they’ve somehow avoided putting out a bad album. A Bath Full Of Ecstasy follows in that tradition; it presents a series of solid dance floor grooves that have the usual dark concerns laced under it – abandonment, the absurdity of existence, uncertainty of faith. Like the Pet Shop Boys and Depeche Mode before them, Hot Chip have always known that there is more to the club than escapist bliss.
Album #1 from the absurdly prolific Aussie psych band takes a dive back into the feel-good post-psych of the Seventies and reinvents the band’s sound for the umpteenth time in order to be a feel-good prog-funk band. What if Chilliwack was actually good? Gizzard answers the question no one was asking.
Also, uh, that album cover.
As far as years to end decades on, you could do worse than 2019. You could do better, of course; both 1969 and 1989 were world-shakers when it came to music (among everything else). But it’s not like 2019 was 2009, when the best album came out in January and everything else was just sort of okay after that. It wasn’t 1999 either, when we were mired in nu-metal and rap-rock, hip hop was still stuck in it’s Gucci-vacation mode, and jazz was still something for old people to tap their toes to while they were waiting on the final heart attack. That year gave us Woodstock ’99, and the less said of that the better.
Rock ‘n’ roll didn’t fare very well throughout the decade, depending on your perspective. A lot of it’s best moments were pretty underground; mainstream rock is a horrorshow that can be best encapsulated in that Billboard chart of the best rock songs of the decade that has numbers one through three occupied by Imagine Dragons. Hip hop, though, has progressed rapidly and weirdly through a strong experimental phase, the haters be damned. The comeback of jazz is in many ways the story of music in the teens, or the tens, or whatever we’re calling this past decade. There will be a number of entries in these three categories and more on this list, of course, but it’s good to take these final entries and use them to take stock of where we’ve been. For many artists, taking the decade challenge is extremely instructive, especially for the one sitting at the #1 spot this year. This is true of many of the artists in the top 20, several of whom were forging names for themselves in the underground in 2009, and others who were at a career crossroads back then.
Another day, another set of data points to add to the list.
Bad day for the CPC, their opposers managed to overwhelm attempts at boosters to get some positive messaging flowing on Twitter. Greens and NDP had good days, although it really does seem like the story of the NDP on Twitter is one of relentless optimism, unlike the numbers coming out of polling organizations where at best they will bleed out seats and at worst they may lose Official Party status. Trudeau and Scheer both get negative sentiment for the day which is probably pretty normal considering they’re the top two candidates in the election and are thus targets for each others partisan keyboard warriors. The May negative turn is interesting and probably has a lot to do with ongoing scandals involving Green candidates proposing to potentially re-open the abortion debate and supporting Quebec separatism. Sentiment for the Green Party as a whole is up though, so it may be that she is taking the brunt of the controversy on herself (not that she doesn’t have her own problems *cough* wifi *cough*). Overall sentiment on #CdnPoli was down; I’m expecting that measure to bounce up and down over the 0-mark for the entire election, based on previous experience with sentiment analysis both on Twitter and through previous work on sentiment in fiction.
Campaign to date for parties:
And campaign to date for leaders:
