Music that I heard:
This week has been spent in prolonged hyper-panic, the kind you get when you have guests coming that you actually care about and want to suddenly do all the housework you haven't done for the last five (six? ten?) years. While restoring the stonework around my fireplace (yeah, that was definitely necessary), I had the misfortune to listen to the new Bloc Party album. I should’ve known better, really, as their work has been in slow but very steady decline since Silent Alarm came out in 2002. The lineup has mutated so much that the band are now a mere session band for Kele when he wants to change up his solo projects. Anatomy of a Brief Romance is described as a concept album charting the start, middle, and end of a relationship, which, off the top of my head, Neil Young has already explored on Comes a Time. Stale ideas aside, the music isn’t fresh or even nostalgic. If I didn’t know, I couldn’t pick out the single(s?). At one point, my eldest turned to me and asked if we could “just listen to something good”. It’s a shame because the album was produced by man-who-invented-the-eighties legend Trevor Horn; I guess it goes to show you can’t polish a turd. Their amazing former drummer, Matt Tong, is in a band called Algiers these days, so that seems like an apt palate cleanser.
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This week’s fact-based adventure is about band names. This week prog-metal fest Arctangent released its line-up, and I’d say I cannot read 25% of them easily because they're written in a pile of sticks. It's become a game among my friends to attempt to read metal festival posters as accurately as possible. One would think Branding 101 would be to make your name clearly readable, but in prog-metal and adjacent genres, being obscure increases your niche. So who started this? Like many inventions or innovations, it's not cut-and-dried. Several metal bands are often cited as the earliest popularisers, including Mayhem, Bathory, Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, and Immortal. These 80s band logos used fonts rooted in medieval hand-copying, specifically a Gothic font called Blackletter. The Norse metal bands morphed these by including horns, roots, and tree parts.
One of my friends found a mandolin last week, and it got me thinking about this under-the-radar, pocket-sized stringed instrument. Here is a short playlist of popular songs featuring the instrument for your enjoyment. Perhaps they will accompany some house maintenance you've been putting off.
