→ December 28, 2022
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The Banshees of Inisherin.

The Banshees of Inisherin is writer/director Martin McDonagh’s first film since 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which was his most acclaimed movie to that point and took home the BAFTA for Best Film and the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Drama. His latest led all films this year with eight Golden Globe nominations, and reunites the two leads from his debut film In Bruges, Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, in a dark comedy with two distinct, serious themes lying beneath the film’s absurdist surface. (It’s streaming now on HBO Max.)

Padraig (Farrell) and Colm (Gleeson) both live on the small island of Inisherin off the west coast of Ireland, where not much of anything happens, and as far as I can tell almost nobody ever has to go to work. Padraig and Colm are drinking buddies who walk to the pub every afternoon, with Padraig stopping by Colm’s house on the way, until one day Colm completely ignores Padraig’s knock, and ignores him at the pub as well, eventually telling him he doesn’t want to be friends any more. This unprovoked severing of ties, which Padraig can’t understand and won’t accept, even in the face of Colm’s threats and rather disturbing actions, leads to an escalation of hostilities that wrecks the peace of the island and leaves nobody better off than before.

McDonagh has a gift for language and crafting witty lines, starting off early on in Banshees when everyone asks Padraig if he and Colm are “rowin’” often enough that it becomes funny just by repetition. The comic elements here are a necessary reprieve from the film’s increasingly dark elements, including the deterioration between the two main characters, the insidious gossip that poisons the island’s culture, young Dominic (Barry Keoghan) and his abusive father, and more. It’s the sort of story where its pervasive awfulness becomes even more apparent after it’s over, because the humor and absurdity mask the bleak story while you’re still watching it.

The film works on one level as an exploration of male friendship, and how fragile those bonds can be in the wrong sort of environment. It’s not so much a question of toxic masculinity, as neither character exhibits much in that vein; Padraig is probably too sensitive, at least when he’s not in his cups, and Colm’s reasons for shunning Padraig and subsequent reactions are more those of someone dealing with mental illness. One of them eventually takes their quarrel too far, pushing them past the point of no return, and a once-solid friendship, one that everyone on the island took as a given, is reduced to ashes.

It’s also a thinly-veiled metaphor for the Irish Civil War, which is often mentioned in the script, including in the final scene, and is nearing its conclusion as the movie takes place. This civil war began after the Irish War of Independence, which led to the establishment of the Irish Free State as a “dominion” within the Commonwealth, giving the island – sans Northern Island, which exercised its opt-out clause and became a free agent remained part of the United Kingdom as Northern Island – greater autonomy, leading to full independence in 1933. After the Free State was established, however, pro-independence forces who opposed this partial solution fought an armed rebellion against the new, provisional government, with former IRA members from the war of independence now split between the two forces. The Irish fought a war to kick out the English, won it, and then ended up fighting themselves, leading to nearly 2000 deaths and substantial economic losses. The conflict may have begun over a principle, but escalated into violence when a democratic solution was likely achievable. It led to decades of mistrust between the spiritual descendants of the two sides, one of which later split into the political parties Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin. The metaphor here doesn’t map perfectly one-to-one – I don’t think Colm is one side and Padraig the other, although a scholar of Irish history may see it quite differently – but it does speak to the pointlessness of war, especially when the two sides escalate hostilities in turn.

This is the best thing I’ve ever seen Colin Farrell do, requiring more range from him than In Bruges or The Lobster, as he makes Padraig feel completely three-dimensional – you know someone like him, someone well-intentioned but unable to get out of his own way, someone who’s probably not the most interesting guy to have a beer with, let alone a beer every day, but who would likely be the first person to show up if you needed help. Gleeson is also strong, as always, but his character is just not as well-written, and his complexity is, shall we say, a little harder to understand. Keoghan is fine as Dominic, who is probably developmentally disabled, although his story feels tangential and his main function seems to be to serve as a plot point for Padraig and Padraig’s sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon), on whom Dominic has a crush. Siobhan’s life is even more stifled than Padraig’s, and an opportunity eventually arises for her to leave Inisherin, a move that completely unmoors her brother, already shaken from having Colm cast him off.

We’ve largely just begun our run through Oscar-worthy movies, so I can’t compare it to much, but I wouldn’t put this over Everything Everywhere All at Once, which is still the best movie I’ve seen from 2022, although I could take an argument for McDonagh’s script over the Daniels’ script for EEAAO. Both are outstanding, but McDonagh’s dialogue is better. The Academy has already nominated McDonagh twice before for his screenplays, which makes me strongly suspect he’ll get a nod for this one as well.

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→ December 22, 2022
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Top 100 songs of 2022.

There was such a flood of new music in the last two months of 2022 that I struggled to keep up with it, even slipping a couple of new albums on my best of 2022 list that I’d only listened to in their entirety in the last couple of weeks. It’s a good outcome, though, as 2022 shaped up to be a better year for new music than I would have said it was coming out of the summer, and I had more songs to put on this list than I could fit (and no, I’m not going past 100, this is work enough for something that’s not my actual job). You can see my previous years’ song rankings here: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.

If you can’t see the Spotify widget below, you can access it here.

100. beabadoobee – 10:36. Beatrice Kristi Laus’s second album, beatopia, refers to a fantasy world she created for herself when she moved with her family from the Philippines to London at age 7. It’s a clear step forward in her songwriting and gets her out of the lo-fi world of her first record. This was my second-favorite track on the album, although “Last Day on Earth,” her one-off single from 2021, isn’t on the LP at all.

99. Stella Donnelly – How Was Your Day? The Welsh-Australian singer-songwriter Donnelly released her second album, Flood, this spring to positive reviews. This track’s witty lyrics, revealing the hidden layers behind that innocuous phrase, and sunny indie-pop make it the album’s best.

98. Young Guv – Nowhere at All. Ben Cook of the Canadian band No Warning released his third album as Young Guv early this year and then followed it up with this one-off jangle-pop single that reminded me quite a bit of last year’s debut record from Chime School.

97. The Linda Lindas – Tonite. I’ve been a bit surprised that the Linda Linda’s debut album Growing Up didn’t appear on any year-end rankings or roundups of the year’s best music that I found, given the hype around the teenage punk band a year or two earlier – and given how good they sound for a bunch of kids. This is a great, vibrant young punk album, just angry enough about the right stuff. I admit it’s not breaking a ton of new ground, but tracks like this one are pretty infectious and point to a promising future.

96. Arlo Parks – Softly. The only music Parks released this year was this track, which brings some electronic music elements to her lovely vocals.

95. Bartees Strange – Wretched. Strange’s second album, Farm to Table, is his big coming-out as a songwriter, bringing him out from under the shadow of his influences (notably the National). This track was one of the album’s standouts, a slower, mournful song that offers thanks to the people who stood by him when he was at his worst.

94. Jungle – Good Times. One of two songs Jungle released this year ahead of an album that didn’t appear in 2022, although I imagine it won’t be that much longer now that their summer/fall tour is over.

93. SAULT – Money. SAULT released six albums this year, five of them at the start of November. One of those five was Today & Tomorrow, the band’s most rock-oriented record to date, even bringing in some punk influences. You can hear it here, where they channel the 1970s punk act Death.

92. The Cool Greenhouse – Get Unjaded. I know this style of very English art-rock music with talk-sung lyrics isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but where else would you find a couplet like “Googling questions like ‘Should I start microdosing?’/And ‘How come I’m standing outside Four Seasons Total Landscaping?’”

91. The Fashion Weak ft. Gruff Rhys – Welsh Words. I admit to some pro-Cymru bias here, but this song is both extremely catch and makes me laugh every time I hear it. Rhys is the lead singer of Super Furry Animals, who’ve recorded entire albums in Welsh, while the Fashion Weak are a new wave revival act whose second single, “Fly Fishing,” featured Miki Berenyi of Lush.

90. Superbloom – Falling Up. The first few seconds are sort of nonsense, the kind of thing the band will grow out of, but I like where the track goes afterwards as these over Nirvana fans expand beyond the well-crafted mimicry of their first album into something more original over the foundation of grunge revival.

89. Stars – Pretenders. Stars’ first album in nearly five years was typically lovely, if perhaps a bit unambitious, featuring plenty of back-and-forth vocals from the two lead singers. They bring an ethereal beauty even to upbeat rock tracks like this one, my favorite on the record.

88. All Them Witches – Hush, I’m on TV. According to Wikipedia, ATW released nine original singles in 2022 plus two covers, but no album. Anyway, I dig their heavy, stoner/blues rock sound, which settles in after the loud, layered riffing that opens this track before the buzzsaw hits in the chorus.

87. The Wombats – Everything I Love is Going to Die. The two best tracks from the Wombats’ 2022 album Fix Yourself, Not the World were both released in 2021, so even though the LP made my best-of-2022 list, this is the only song from the record on this year’s top 100.

86. Preoccupations – Ricochet. The best song from Preoccupations’ fourth album Arrangements is this track, which fuses their typical post-punk/early new wave sound with elements of early ‘90s shoegaze.

85. Porcupine Tree – Rats Return. “Harridan” was my favorite song on CLOSURE/CONTINUATION, but this is a close second, less ambitious but highlighted by the best guitar riff on the entire album, a dark, minor-key line that infuses the whole song with a sense of foreboding.

84. Cory Wong – Power Station. Wong released two albums in 2022, Wong’s Café in January and Power Station in April, with this, obviously from the latter album, sounding like something discovered in Prince’s archives from the early 1980s, just with a better guitar solo.

83. The Afghan Whigs – I’ll Make You See God. The Whigs have always been able to rock, but this track goes 0 to 90 in the opening seconds and never lets up – enough that it ended up in the video game Gran Turismo 7. The lyrics appear to be total nonsense, but man, this sucker rocks.

82. Gojira – Our Time is Now. Gojira put out the best metal song of the year – and it’s the only song they released all year, although I’m hopeful we’re getting a new Gojira album soon. It’s not my favorite Gojira song ever, but it might be their most accessible, if that’s possible.

81. Black Honey – Heavy. I didn’t love their previous single, “Charlie Bronson,” but “Heavy” is more the Black Honey I know and love, indie-rock with a strong melody crossed with a harder edge.

80. Crawlers – I Don’t Want It. Barely over two minutes long, this little earworm from the Liverpudlian quartet Crawlers is their best track to date and one of two strong singles from their second EP, Loud Without Noise, along with “Too Soon.”

79. Sports Team – The Drop. I could have put as many as five songs from Gulp! on this top 100, but ended up with two, adding this track because the main hook is so memorable, and it’s one of the more interesting tracks on the album because of the one right turn it takes at the bridge.

78. Killing Joke – Lord of Chaos. Jaz Coleman is 62, and with his age and seven years passing since Killing Joke’s last album, Pylon, I figured we were done getting new music from the band. Killing Joke defy labels as much as any artist I can think of – I suppose people who know Sparks’ music would say the same, but I don’t know their oeuvre as well – so it was sort of a pleasant surprise to hear this track and “Total” follow in the same heavy-rock vein as that last album, which gave us the incredible single “Euphoria.”

77. Band of Horses – Warning Signs. Band of Horses’ best songs can be pretty great, like “Is There a Ghost,” but I find their albums nearly always let me down, and this year’s Things Are Great was more of the same. This was my favorite track, although I think that’s probably because it reminds me of the way I want Band of Horses to sound all the time.

76. Melt Yourself Down – Balance. I admit to ignorance on Melt Yourself Down, and I need to explore their discography some more, as I liked what I heard from this year as they released their fourth album Pray for Me, I Don’t Fit In. Their music doesn’t just blend genres from around the world, but it does so in a frenetic fashion that holds my interest even when the song doesn’t have a great hook (“Nightsiren”). This was the best track from the album, with three great hooks in the vocals, the saxophone line, and the guitar riff around the 1:30 mark.

75. The Mysterines – Means to Bleed. The Mysterines released their debut album, Reeling, in March, but it didn’t include most of the great singles they’d released over the previous couple of years, like “I Win Every Time,” “Love’s Not Enough,” “Bet Your Pretty Face,” or “Gasoline.” The album has the right vibe, just without the highlights, although this and “Hung Up” are solid examples of their sound and their potential.

74. Jack White feat. Q-Tip – Hi-De-Ho. The Jack White/Q-Tip partnership that first appeared on record with A Tribe Called Quest’s swan song We Got It From Here … Thank You For Your Service continued this year with Q-Tip’s guest spot on this track from the first of White’s two albums released in 2022, Fear of the Dawn. The result here, based on an interpolation of Cab Calloway’s famous scatting phrase, is wonderfully weird and catchy, and by now you probably realize I give 5 bonus points to any track including Kamaal the Abstract.

73. Kid Kapichi – Rob the Supermarket. I can’t avoid thinking of this as some sort of late-stage capitalist response to the Clash’s anti-consumerist “Lost in the Supermarket,” while also marveling at how Kid Kapichi have taken the mantle that Alex Turner dropped somewhere in the late teens.

72. Freddie Gibbs feat. Moneybagg Yo. Gibbs is one of the best technical rappers going now, and pairs it with consistently interesting and often weird backing music; this track, the best from the regular edition of Gibbs’s $oul $old $eparately, shows off his rhyming speed and rhythm better than anything else on the record.

71. beabadoobee – Talk. The best track from beatopia has a little harder of an edge to the music and mixes her vocals up accordingly to pair with the walls of distortion in the chorus, along with the album’s best melody.

70. Talk Show – Cold House. Talk Show, unrelated to the Stone Temple Pilots offshoot from about twenty years ago, released two EPs this year; Touch the Ground had six songs, including last year’s “Underworld” and this track that encapsulates their blend of post-punk, new wave revival, and dark wave.

69. HAIM – Lost Track. I’ve never gotten the hype for HAIM, but man this song has a hell of a hook in the chorus, and it’s the perfect length for a song of this simplicity.

68. FKA twigs featuring Jorja Smith and Unknown T – darjeeling. I love FKA twigs and I love Jorja Smith, so I’m clearly in the target audience for this track from FKA twigs’ album mixtape, and indeed it’s Smith’s vocals that elevate the track.

67. Tei Shi – GRIP. Big year for songs/albums calling out the music industry’s more exploitative practices. Tei Shi pulled her 2021 album La Linda from streaming services after Downtown Records refused to pay her the remainder of her advance two years aft, er its release. “GRIP” is her diss track against that label and the industry as a whole.

66. Editors – Karma Climb. I was a little underwhelmed by EBM, Editors’ latest album and first with Blanck Mass (Benjamin Power) as a member, but the chorus on “Karma Climb” is extremely catchy and I think a good example of their early Interpol-esque dark indie sound.

65. Greentea Peng – Your Mind. Greentea Peng’s eclectic mix of styles can be very hit or miss, missing on “Stuck in the Middle” but hitting here on “Your Mind,” which incorporates traditional soul, jazz, and some rock guitar lines. Both appeared on her mixtape GREENZONE 108 this September. I wonder if it’s more than a coincidence that this song’s length is 4:20.

64. Sudan Archives – Home Maker. The opening track from Natural Brown Prom Queen, my #2 album of the year, fakes you out with a minute-long intro that almost sounds like someone pressed ‘record’ before anyone was ready, but it’s all a matter of building tension before Britt Parks starts up with her mixture of rap and vocals, and by the two-minute mark she’s shipped you back almost fifty years in time with her classic R&B sounds.

63. Sky Ferreira – Don’t Forget. I had forgotten, it turns out, as Ferreira released just one song between 2014 and 2022, 2019’s “Downhill Lullaby.” This track is supposed to herald the release of her long-awaited second album, Masochism, although it’s still unscheduled; if this is where her sound has evolved after the long layoff, into a darker version of synth-pop, I’m all for it.

62. Sprints – Literary Mind. Sprints released an EP earlier in 2022, Modern Job, featuring the title track and “Delia Smith,” while this single came later and might be their catchiest song to date, without losing any of their signature garage or punk elements.

61. Automatic – Skyscraper. Automatic released their second album, Excess, in June, and this third single from the record was actually the first of their songs I’d heard, a pulsing, dark synth-pop track powered by a prominent, wandering bass line.

60. Dry Cleaning – Don’t Press Me. I’m very sensitive to how a vocalist sings, and often it doesn’t even make that much sense to me. I don’t love the vocals from Dry Cleaning, even though that flat, almost toneless style of sing-talking doesn’t necessarily bother me from other singers, just as I can’t stand Porridge Radio’s whiny, cracking vocals. “Don’t Press Me” is a rare example where the vocals on a Dry Cleaning song aren’t enough to deter me from an outstanding Wire-ish track.

59. Hatchie – Quicksand. I was a little … not underwhelmed, but maybe just whelmed by Hatchie’s new album this year, as it seemed like the Aussie singer/songwriter might be stagnating; the best track was last year’s “This Enchanted,” followed by this song, both solid examples of her particular brand of dream pop.

58. CVC – Good Morning Vietnam. CVC have been gigging in Cardiff (that’s Wales) since before the pandemic but didn’t start releasing music until this year, when they dropped a couple of singles, including this odd mélange of psychedelic rock and ‘70s soft rock with a funk-adjacent bass line. “Docking My Pay” is also worth checking out if you like this track, as we wait for CVC to drop a full album.

57. Yard Act – Pour Another. Yard Act’s debut album The Overload dropped in January and its best songs had already appeared, including the superb title track and the peculiar “Payday,” leaving this as the best song from the band in 2022. I’ll forever compare them to Gang of Four, although here there’s a more joyous, almost silly vibe.

56. Crows – Garden of England. The standout track on Slowly Separate, bringing punk energy to their particular brand of hard-rock-verging-on-metal. I’d fly to London tomorrow for a Kid Kapichi/Crows double billing.

55. MUNA – What I Want. MUNA’s self-titled third album made a few best-of-2022 lists, although it didn’t quite make the cut for me. I do like their unabashedly poppy approach; I just feel like they’re often a little short in the hooks department. This was the best track on the record for me, and unsurprisingly I think the most acclaimed as well.

54. shame – Fingers of Steel. shame’s sophomore album Food for Worms is due out February 24th, with this the lead single. I see them tabbed everywhere as “post-punk,” but I don’t think it fits; they’re an alternative rock act in the clearest sense of the word, working with dissonant sounds and unusual rhythms that will probably always keep them out of the mainstream. I’m also in awe of the fact that they named a song “Baldur’s Gate” after my all-time favorite CPRG series.

53. John-Allison Weiss – Different Now. Weiss’ first new music since coming out as non-binary & trans in 2017, and first for Get Better Records, was this aptly titled song that doubles as a bittersweet breakup track.

52. Death Cab for Cutie – Here to Forever. DCFC seem good for one real standout single on every album at this point, such as “Gold Rush” from 2018’s Thank You for Today and “Black Sun” from Kintsugi. That may not quite hit the highs of Codes and Keys or Transatlanticism, but I’d say this is pretty good for a band approaching the 25th anniversary of its first album, and singing about mortality and surviving.

51. STONE – Waste. This Liverpool garage-punk band signed to Polydor earlier in the year and ended it with a banger of a six-song EP, highlighted by this abrasive track that starts angry and ends up furious.

50. Sam Fender – Alright. A tremendous non-album single from the Seventeen Going Under sessions, included in a live version on a bonus version of the 2021 LP released this summer. You’ll notice I don’t include many slower-tempo songs on these lists, especially ones that aren’t acoustic, so that should give you some sense of how much I like this.

49. Foals – Looking High. I thought Foals’ Life is Yours was just a big ol’ mess of danceable fun, but it didn’t receive the plaudits I expected, with a lot of criticism over the lyrics – which has never been a strength of Foals’ songwriter Yannis Philippakis. (“I see a mountain at my gates/I see it more and more each day.” Shades of Keats and Shelley there.) This or “Wake Me Up” vie for my favorite track on the album.

48. GIFT – Gumball Garden. A five-minute opus that starts out in shoegaze territory and then shifts almost to power-pop territory before turning back around on itself. Their album Momentary Presence has a lot of that combination, bigger melodies and faster tempos mixed with shimmering guitars and synths out of shoegaze.

47. Lizzo – About Damn Time. You may have heard this song. Special lists twenty-five different people as producers, and somehow, none of them was Nile Rodgers. This track is so chic Rodgers might as well have produced it and played guitar.

46. Kendrick Lamar feat. Sampha – Father Time. Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers is certainly ambitious, but it’s too long and inconsistent, which led me to leave it off my top albums of the year list. “N95” is solid, and “Auntie Diaries” has a truly incredible and necessary sentiment (although it contains a word best omitted, despite the message). This song was the real highlight for me, thanks to the chorus from Mercury Prize winner Sampha.

45. The Head and the Heart – Shut Up. Every Shade of Blue had its highs and lows for me, which is how I pretty much always feel about H&H’s albums, although I loved this song and “Virginia (Wind in the Night)” from their latest.

44. SAULT – Above the Sky. The best track from the best of the six albums SAULT released this year (Today & Tomorrow), incorporating rock elements into the sound they honed on their first four albums, including a guitar solo with distortion and reverb that evoke Hendrix. Also, it’s kind of nuts that SAULT has released eleven albums in three and a half years.

43. The Lathums – Say My Name. The Arctic Monkeys meet the Amazons? It’s anthemic, muscular rock, and I’m fine with that, even if it’s of a sort we’ve heard before.

42. Anxious – Call From You. It’s post-hardcore, emo, whatever, but with real harmonies, and that little guitar riff you hear in the intro is so unexpected from this subgenre that it has consistently brought me back to this song on a generally great album.

41. Just Mustard – Mirrors. So I’ve said many times I was never a My Bloody Valentine fan, even with their general critical acclaim and my own affinity for shoegaze, because I just hear waves of noise, not individual notes or chords. “I Only Said” is the exception, because there’s an actual melody to latch on to. If you made an even more accessible version of that song, you’d get “Mirrors.”

40. Danger Mouse & Black Thought feat. MF Doom – Belize. Of course, I had to include this track from Cheat Codes, as it’s probably the final recording to feature the late MF Doom (a.k.a Zev Love X), although it’s hard to single out any particular tracks on the generally excellent DM/BT collaboration.

39. Young Fathers – I Saw. The Mercury Prize winners will drop their fourth album, Heavy Heavy, early in 2023, and from the first three singles it looks like we’re in for even more musical experimentation. This was by far my favorite of the three, though, as there’s a hint of their rap origins and a rising sense of indignation as the song progresses.

38. Belle & Sebastian – Unnecessary Drama. I don’t know why people get upset when Belle & Sebastian rock out a little, or hit the dance floor, as long as their essential Belle-and-Sebastian-ness is intact. Stuart Murdoch’s wry, sardonic lyrics are still here, as are the band’s harmonies, so who’s to argue if they have a little more fun?

37. Gang of Youths – in the wake of your leave. I don’t think any album disappointed me more than angel in realtime., which had three incredible singles to tease it (“the angel of 8th ave.” and “unison”) and nothing else of note. The rest of the record felt self-indulgent, even pretentious, and worst of all devoid of energy. But those three tracks … I’m not sure anyone has evoked early U2 so effortlessly.

36. Khruangbin feat. Leon Bridges – B-side. The collaboration that began two years ago with Texas Sun continued this year with Texas Moon, highlighted by this danceable, soulful, and of course jazz-inflected single.

35. The Beths – Expert in a Dying Field. The title track from my #1 album of 2022 is just a perfect Beths song, shiny and bright and poppy and just a little dark around the edges.

34. Sunflower Bean – I Don’t Have Control Sometimes. Sunflower Bean had a moment this year, pun intended, with “Moment in the Sun” appearing in the final episode of Netflix’s Heartstopper, and their latest album Headful of Sugar had a number of similarly melodic lo-fi gems, including this one, which hits you with the melody right out of the chute.

33. The Smile – Thin Thing. The more I listened to the Smile’s debut album, the less I liked it, finding it experimental in some ways but often exactly what you’d expect if you smushed Jonny Greenwood’s soundtrack work with Thom Yorke’s vocals and the drummer from jazz group Sons of Kemet. It turns out it’s not that interesting. This track has the most to offer, starting with that odd syncopated guitar line that opens the song and moves on through it.

32. Blossoms – The Sulking Poet. Good luck getting this chorus out of your head. It’s a bit of Lord Huron, a bit of Head and the Heart, a bit of the Kooks, and oddly American-sounding for a band from Stockport, England.

31. Everything Everything – Bad Friday. If you liked Everything Everything’s early work, like “Cough Cough,” “Kemosabe,” “MY KZ UR BF,” and so on, this would likely be your favorite song from their newest album Raw Data Feel. It’s their most frenetic, most freewheeling track on the record, and we get more of the falsetto vocals that show up on just about all of their best songs.

30. Megan Thee Stallion – Her. I think Megan Thee Stallion is in the uppermost echelon of rappers today when it comes to speed, flow, and verbal dexterity, but I don’t think she picks music that does enough to accentuate her skills – or at least to work with them to make better songs. Only this and “Plan B” really stood out to me from Traumazine as songs that worked on all levels, from rhyme to music.

29. Rina Sawayama – This Hell. Sawayama’s second album, Hold the Girl, sees the singer/songwriter leaning far more into her pop sensibilities, which means it lacks the edge or ambition of her debut record, but also has a few more mainstream-ready tracks like this one. It’s her most overtly pop song yet, opening with a trite callback to Shania Twain and passing through a number of popular catchphrases and allusions, but highlights her idiosyncratic blend of styles and ability to craft a memorable hook.

28. Kae Tempest and Grian Chatten – I Saw Light. A spoken-word track over a hypnotic, minimalist synth line that sees the English poet/rapper Tempest sharing the vocals with Fontaines D.C. singer Chatten. Tempest’s lyrics are superb – a song like this can’t succeed without that – and the sparse music behind them creates a forbidding mood without getting in the way of the two speakers.

27. Griff & Sigrid – Head on Fire. Griff is a rising superstar, taking home a couple of Brit Award nominations last year shortly after she turned 21 (including Best New Artist, which she lost to Little Simz … who won for her fourth album), while Sigrid is already a star in Europe, so it was a little disappointing to see this track, with its catchy-as-hell chorus, fare poorly on the charts even in their home countries.

26. White Lies – Trouble in America. A bonus track on the deluxe edition of As I Try Not to Fall Apart that should have made the record proper given how potent this chorus is. It’s one of my favorite tracks ever from White Lies, six albums in, with some tremendous bass work from Charles Cave.

25. Phoenix feat. Ezra Koenig – Tonight. The best track on Phoenix’s fun, straightforward new album Alpha Zulu, which had a few other standouts, including “All Eyes on Me.” This one features Vampire Weekend lead singer/founder Koenig, but I like it anyway.

24. Christine and the Queens – Je te vois enfin. The best track from Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue) recalls the dark pop sounds from his 2020 EP La Vita Nuova and even parts of his 2018 album Chris.

23. Soccer Mommy – Shotgun. My favorite track from Soccer Mommy’s acclaimed album Sometimes, Forever has some of her strongest vocals – I find her voice can be droning, but here it’s well paired with the music and comes off as more ethereal and dreamy than whiny.

22. Little Simz – Angel. Simz won the Mercury Prize in October for Sometimes I Might Be, my #1 album of 2021, and then released NO THANK YOU, a simpler album that excoriates the music industry,twomonths later. This opener is a six-minute polemic against the exploitation Simz faced over the last year-plus since her magnum opus was first released, although I found in general NO THANK YOU doesn’t have the same degree of musical ambition as the preceding LP.

21. Mandrake Handshake – Emonzaemon. This Oxford-based psychedelic rock band released their second EP, The Triple Point of Water, last month, with three songs that run a total of nearly 20 minutes. I could see them being big on the jam-band circuit with this sound and those running times, but that’s not to dismiss the great guitar lick that opens this track and carries it all the way through until the heavier guitars kick in for the last thirty seconds.

20. Lizzo – 2 Be Loved (Am I Ready). The best track on Special is the one that calls back to Prince both in title and in sound, which couldn’t have been more tailor-made for me.

19. Momma – Speeding 72. There’s a big Veruca Salt vibe to the vocals on this track, but mixed with fuzzier garage-rock production and some heavier bass work from a band that likes to employ the drop-D tuning more associated with metal acts.

18. The Reytons – Avalanche. Sometimes I just want a big, crunchy rock song that announces its presence with authority in the opening seconds and never lets up on the gas pedal until it’s done. So I give you “Avalanche.”

17. Sharon van Etten – Mistakes. As with Soccer Mommy, van Etten’s vocal style often grates on me – she sounds stoned or just disinterested on so many of her songs – even when I like her music. Here she belts it out on the earworm chorus, maybe the best hook she’s ever crafted.

16. Kid Kapichi feat. Bob Vylan – New England. Vylan is the perfect collaborator for Kid Kapichi’s style of bitter, sarcastic attacks on modern British society between the duo’s track “GDP” last year and Kapichi’s … well, their entire catalog to date. “You’re such a fool, Britannia” probably wouldn’t get anyone many votes but it’s certainly sums up the Brexiteers.

15. Wet Leg – Angelica. I know “Chaise Longue” and “Ur Mum” have earned more plaudits, and the former was a legitimate commercial breakout track, but this is their best song by a mile – it’s got a better hook, the sonic interplay between the two vocalists works far better here than on other tracks, and this time the lyrics are actually funny.

14. Spiritualized – The Mainline Song. Everything Was Beautiful, the space-rock pioneers’ first new album in four years and only their second in a decade, came out in April, highlighted by this gorgeous, textured, melancholy song, the only flaw in which is that it could use some additional lyrics.

13. Let’s Eat Grandma – Levitation. I understand this band’s name (think “eats, shoots and leaves”) but it still kind of bugs me. They can write a pretty great synth-pop song, though.

12. Lucius – Next to Normal. One of the year’s best bass lines came on this funky track from Second Nature, Lucius’ first album of new material since 2016.

11. Metronomy – Good to Be Back. What a weirdly happy, bouncy song – it feels like someone slipped it into the TARDIS in the early 1980s, from the new wave-y sound to the sparse production, but that main synth line is so catchy it would fit in any era. The song is so good that Panic Shack’s punk cover of it works just as well.

10. FKA twigs feat. rema – jealousy. The best track from CAPRISONGS includes the Nigerian “Afrorave” singer Rema and has a swirling, Afrobeat-like backdrop to the vocals that feels immersive even with a too-short running time below three minutes.

9. Riverby – Chapel. Riverby is a punk act from Philly, but this song from their latest album Absolution is an absolutely gorgeous ballad that showcases lead singer/guitarist August Greenberg’s beautiful voice. I’d take a whole album made out of this, thanks.

8. Blossoms – Ode to NYC. The most Lord Huron-ish track on Ribbon Around the World also feels like the replacement for Ryan Adams’ “New York, New York.” As someone who grew up in the suburbs of the Big Apple, I was never not in love with New York City, but I’m also always happy to sing along with praises of my favorite place in the U.S.

7. Mattiel – Lighthouse. There are two great hooks in this track, both driven by the powerful voice of lead singer Mattiel Brown, from her new album Georgia Gothic. It reminds me a ton of Swing Out Sister’s breakout hit … uh, “Breakout,” from 1986, which I mean as a high compliment.

6. Jamie T – The Old Style Raiders. In a year when the Arctic Monkeys gave up on rock, we didn’t lack for artists stepping in to fill the void they’ve left behind, from the Lathums to the Reytons to Kid Kapichi, along with this track from British star Jamie T, whose 2022 album The Theory of Whatever hit #1 in the UK.

5. Sports Team – Dig! I loved Sports Team’s new album Gulp! and this is the song I keep coming back to. If I were a big-league reliever, I’d warm up to this track, which brings huge energy with the initial bass line and that three-chord riff, like someone put a cinder block on the gas pedal.

4. Sudan Archives – NBPQ (Topless). The best track from my #2 album of the year refers to that LP’s title, Natural Brown Prom Queen, and wanders through what feels like three different genres while always coming back to the tagline from the chorus, “I’m not average.” She’s anything but.

3. The Beths – When You Know You Know. If anyone ever asked me why I like the Beths so much, I’d just play this song, which has everything that makes them great: a big hook in the chorus, sunny vocals with a great harmony, witty lyrics, and jangly guitars. Almost all of Expert in a Dying Field is like this, but here everything comes together perfectly for the best song the Beths have ever recorded.

2. Spoon – Wild. Man, Lucifer on the Sofa did not live up to this single at all, but for three minutes it felt like we had peak Spoon again. That simple, sparing guitar line in the verse feels like a rubber band about to snap, and the song never quite lets out that tension. I liked the previous single, “The Hardest Cut,” as well, but the rest of the record was just filler after these two songs.

1. Bartees Strange – Heavy Heart. What’s the opposite of the sophomore slump? Strange’s debut album was solid, and promising, but also limited, and it seemed like he might just be another indie-rock singer/songwriter who had a distinct voice but whose music sounded like too much else from indie/college radio of the last decade or so – notably his primary influence, the National. Instead of continuing in that vein, we got Farm to Table, a wide-ranging, genre-skipping, guitar-driven record with sensitive, introspective lyrics, led by this song, which feels like two for the price of one, punctuated by that giant guitar break just after the two minute mark that I would bet brings the house down when he plays it live. I had Strange in the wrong category after the first record, figuring I’d respect his music more than I liked it. His growth as a musician and lyricist is one of the great stories of music in 2022.

Feel free to throw any of your favorites – songs, albums, EPs, mixtapes – in the comments!

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→ December 21, 2022
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Top 22 albums of 2022.

I don’t think 2022 was as strong for albums as 2021 was, where I could have run 30 deep on the rankings, but I had enough that I could keep up this gimmick of ranking a number of LPs equal to the last two digits of the year, and even made a few cuts in the final go. I know streaming has sort of killed the album in a sense, and I’m partly to blame as someone who generally prefers listening to specific songs over full records, but I also appreciate the artist’s vision for an album and am happy to support that in a tiny way here, even if it’s just “I like this collection of songs.” Honorable mentions include Everything Everything’s Raw Data Feel, Foals’ Life is Yours, and the Mysterines’ Reeling (which would have made the cut if they’d included more of their early singles), MUNA’s MUNA, Little Simz’s NO THANK YOU (released just five days ago, and very good, but I need to listen to it more), and beabadoobee’s beatopia.

You can see my previous year-end album rankings here: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and my top albums of the 2010s. My top 100 songs of 2022 will go up in the next day or two.

22. Elder – Innate Passage. A very last-minute addition to the list, as Ian Miller of Kowloon Walled City recommended this LP to me over the weekend, and, since he knows my tastes pretty well, it hit its mark. Elder is a progressive metal band with heavy stoner/doom elements to their music, and this album, their sixth, is their first with vocalist/guitarist Nick DiSalvo as the only remaining founding member. It’s just five tracks and runs 53 minutes, with a solid mix of proggy metal riffing, tempo and tone changes, and even some harmonies in the vocals.

21. Sunflower Bean – Headful of Sugar. I feel like Sunflower Bean are a post-hype prospect at this point; the music press seem to have moved on, or decided the band isn’t going to hit its ceiling, rather than appreciating them for what they are and for the potential they still have. Their brand of sunny jangle-pop with a little bit of garage to it might be a little familiar, but they offer a perfect slice of it on this album. Highlights include “Baby Don’t Cry,” “Who Put You Up to This?,” “I Don’t Have Control Sometimes,” and the bonus track “Moment in the Sun,” a one-off single they added to the album after it was used in Heartstopper.

20. Porcupine Tree – CLOSURE/CONTINUATION. Porcupine Tree returned after a 12-year hiatus as if they’d never left, still proggy after all these years, but without becoming overindulgent as the genre often sees. Founder Steven Wilson has produced three Opeth albums in the interim, and Porcupine Tree previously toured with the prog-metal giants, so it’s hard not to hear the latter’s influence here in some of the strongest guitar riffing. Highlights include “Harridan,” “Chimera’s Wreck,” and “Rats Return.”

19. Danger Mouse and Black Thought – Cheat Codes. Hard to believe, but this was Danger Mouse’s first hip-hop album in 17 years, since the last Danger Doom collaboration with the late MF Doom, whose vocals appear on the track “Belize.” This is peak Black Thought, with solid contributions from Danger Mouse, although the producer gets first billing here. Highlights include “Belize,” of course, as well as “The Darkest Part” and “Aquamarine.”

18. The Wombats – Fix Yourself, Not the World. A return to form for the Wombats after the uneven Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life, the band’s fifth album veers more into an overt pop direction than their best LP to date, Glitterbug, but doesn’t skimp on the witty lyrics or shifts in tone and tempo. The EP they released in November of tracks that didn’t make the album, Is This What It Feels Like to Feel Like This?, has six more songs in a similar vein, several of which probably should have made the cut. Highlights from the LP include “If You Ever Leave, I’m Coming With You,” “Everything I Love Is Going to Die,” and “Method to the Madness,” the last one of the most ornate songs the group has ever released.

17. Belle & Sebastian – A Bit of Previous. The Scottish indie stalwarts’ first new album in seven years, although they’ve released three EPs in the interim, A Bit of Previous doesn’t abandon the sunnier pop melodies and sounds of their last record, the effusive Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, although it’s a bit darker in tone and lyrics. Highlights include “Young and Stupid,” “Talk to Me Talk to Me,” and “Unnecessary Drama.”

16. Lizzo – Special. No record surprised me more than Lizzo’s Special, since I was certainly familiar with her work and her impressive voice, but never connected with her music at all. On her fourth album, Lizzo produced an ebullient record full of musical callbacks to pop, disco, and funk from the 1970s and 1980s, along with more than a little nod to Prince here and there. I guess we’ll always have to wonder what that never-made Lizzo EP that Prince was slated to produce would sound like, but I’d like to think we got some of that sound on Special. Highlights include “2 Be Loved (Am I Ready),” the #1 single “About Damn Time,” “The Sign,” and “Everybody’s Gay.”

15. Anxious – Little Green House. The debut full-length from this Connecticut quintet, which draws on emo and punk with a real dose of pop hooks and harmonies, was one of the best straight-out rock records of the year, and would have fit in quite well on a best-of list from 20 years ago at the height of emo and the absurdly titled “screamo” subgenre. There is a decent bit of screaming here, some of which I could have done without, as there’s plenty of dissonance coming from the guitarwork. The album is a raucous joy straight on through until the shocking closer “You When You’re Gone,” a slow song (!) with vocals from Stella Branstool of Hello Mary. Highlights include that track, “In April,” “Call from You,” and “Afternoon.”

14. Freddie Gibbs – $oul $old $eparately. Gibbs might be the best technical rapper going now, and he is certainly the most interesting, doing far more with the music over which he rhymes than anyone else I can think of. He has a host of guests on this sprawling, hour-long record, including Anderson .Paak, Raekwon, Pusha T, Musiq Soulchild, and Scarface. Highlights include “Too Much,” “Feel No Pain,” and “Dark Hearted,” as well as “Big Boss Rabbit” from the bonus edition.

13. Bartees Strange – Farm to Table. Strange’s sophomore album finds him leaning even more into his trad-rock side, and away from the comparisons to one of his inspirations, The National. The glimpses we had of the real Bartees on his debut are the dominant theme here, with great hooks and wistful lyrics about small things like the meaning of life and the prevalence of death. Highlights include “Heavy Heart,” “Wretched,” and “Black Gold.”

12. White Lies – As I Try Not to Fall Apart. Wikipedia calls White Lies a “post-punk revival” band, but this is new wave, and I will not stand for any erasure of that genre. (Get it? Erasure? Never mind.) Their sixth album feels like a culmination, as if they’ve truly identified their sound and have been working towards this for several records now, with previous albums having similar highlights (“There Goes Our Love Again” from Big TV, “Tokyo” from Five) but lacking this one’s depth and consistent quality. The contrast of melancholic lyrics and darkly joyous music is the strongest callback to 1980s new wave, and it’s practically pandering to an audience of me. The bonus edition includes four more tracks, including the outstanding “Trouble in America.” Highlights include the title track, “Am I Really Going to Die,” “I Don’t Want to Go to Mars,” and “Step Outside.”

11. Crows – Beware Believers. I was surprised how little press this sophomore album from Crows received, given the positive reception for their 2019 debut record Silver Tongues. Crows get billed as a punk band, but that sells them short – they’re a hard rock band in the old style, writing heavy, grinding tracks with distorted guitars, big riffs, and no pretense. Highlights include the title track, “Garden of England,” “Healing,” and “Closer Still.”

10. Christine and the Queens – Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue). Redcar is Christine & the Queens’ latest nom de plume, after he used Chris on his last album and briefly used the name Rahim last year. It’s a breakup album, at least off the lyrics, but the music is anything but depressing. He backs up these tracks about a lost love (or loves?) with soulful music that draws on pop, soul, even elements of jazz. Highlights include “rien dire,” “Ma bien aimée bye bye,” and “Je te vois enfin.”

9. Just Mustard – Heart Under. This Irish shoegaze band showed promise on their 2018 debut album Wednesday, but this album carves out its own post-shoegaze sound, with the same droning guitars but without the inscrutable walls of sound that made My Bloody Valentine critical darlings whose music I couldn’t abide. Highlights here include “Still,” “23,” “Mirrors,” and “I Am You.”

8. Sports Team – Gulp! Coming in at a scant 33:41, this barely full-length record from Sports Team, the band’s second, is ten tracks of raucous, fun, art-punk-inspired rock-and-roll. It gets off to a strong start with “The Game” and never lets up, with hooks and big energy all the way through. Highlights include “Dig!,” “The Drop,” “The Game,” and “R Entertainment.”

7. White Lung – Premonition. The newest album on the list, released just two weeks ago, is also the swan song for this Vancouver punk-metal band, as lead singer Mish Barber-Way decided to call it quits after having her second kid last year. (She’s also apparently still executive editor of Penthouse.) Premonition has apparently been in the works since 2019, but baby #1 and the pandemic pushed the record back, so while they’re going out with a bang, it appears this is the end for this underappreciated act. Highlights include “Tomorrow,” “Date Night,” and “Bird.”

6. Kid Kapichi – Here’s What You Could Have Won. In a year when the Arctic Monkeys confirmed for us all that they’re no longer a rock band – and some critics seemed unwilling to point out that Alex Turner has no clothes – Kid Kapichi are here to take up the mantle of guitar-driven rock with intelligent, sardonic lyrics, here taking aim at the popular targets of those disaffected with late-stage capitalist Britain. Kid Kapichi start off making it very clear where they stand on the snarling opener “New England” – which is not about the changing of the leaves in Vermont – featuring Bob Vylan, and the rage never really slows from there, not even for the acoustic “Party at No. 10.” Highlights include “New England,” “Rob the Supermarket,” “Super Soaker,” and “Cops and Robbers.”

5. SAULT – Today & Tomorrow. SAULT released six albums in 2022, five of them on one day in November. Each of the five explored a different genre or style, with Today & Tomorrow, my favorite of the set, finding the secretive London-based group delving into rock and punk sounds for the first time. Highlights include “The Plan,” “Lion,” “Money,” and “Above the Sky.” If you’re curious about the others, I’d rank the five albums Today & Tomorrow, Earth, 11, Aiir, and God, in order from best to worst.

4. FKA Twigs – CAPRISONGS. She calls this a mixtape, but it’s 17 songs and 48 minutes long. It’s an album. It’s uneven, both in quality and theme, less cohesive than her album Magdalene, but the highs are very high here, and FKA Twigs (Tahliah Barnett) experiments more with tones and styles than on her formal LP. Highlights include “honda,” “darjeeling,” and “jealousy.”

3. Yard Act – The Overload. The debut record from these likely lads from Leeds might as well be a spiritual sequel to the earliest work of Gang of Four or maybe a lost album from The Fall, but updated with occasional flourishes of hip-hop (which, I concede, don’t always work) and a more modern take on the working class progressivism of their forebears. Highlights include the title track, “Payday,” “Pour Another,” and “The Incident.”

2. Sudan Archives – Natural Brown Prom Queen. Sudan Archives is violinist/singer Brittney Denise Parks, who released her second LP this year to massive and well-deserved acclaim. It’s a genre-bending, world-spanning record that features abrupt tonal shifts within and between songs, lyrics that are by turns smart and frivolous, and a whole bunch of songs that just plain groove. Highlights include “NBPQ (Topless),” “Yellow Brick Road,” the sinister-sounding “Homemaker,” and “Freakalizer.”

1. The Beths – Expert in a Dying Field. This is the album I’ve been waiting for the Beths to make since I first heard “You Wouldn’t Like Me” back in 2018. Expert in a Dying Field is a perfect exemplar of this New Zealand band’s sunny take on power-pop, with perfect harmonies and an endless supply of melodies. They call back to ‘80s power-pop standouts like Jellyfish and Apples in Stereo while adding their own stamp, not least from lead singer/guitarist Elizabeth Stokes’ delightful accent. There’s enough diversity in the tracks here to make it worth listening all the way through, but it’s also the best collection of singles I heard in 2022. Highlights include the title track, “When You Know You Know,” “Knees Deep,” and “Silence is Golden.”

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→ December 17, 2022
→ By

Stick to baseball, 12/17/22.

Five new posts this week for subscribers to The Athletic:

I’ll try to do a Klawchat this upcoming week as my schedule permits; I’m trying to fill my days with calls for the prospect rankings package that will run in late January or early February.

My top ten games of 2022 article is already in my editor’s hands at Paste, so that should be up any day now. I’ll update here when it runs.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Boston Globe writer Alex Speier, talking about the Red Sox’ confusing offseason so far and apparent desire to act like a small- or medium-payroll team. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’ve got a new email newsletter about half-written, so I’m really hoping I can finish that off tonight or tomorrow. You can sign up here, for free. Also, you can buy either of my books, Smart Baseball or The Inside Game, via bookshop.org at those links, or at your friendly local independent bookstore.

Finally, I caved and set up an account on Mastodon, @keithlaw@mastodon.au. Perhaps that’ll prove a better place for actual discussions with readers as the bird site becomes overrun by trolls – even my post saying I was on Mastodon attracted three randos who seemed only there to mock anyone who said they were leaving Twitter (which I’m not).

And now, the links…

And now, the links…

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→ December 16, 2022
→ By

The Bone Clocks.

I love David Mitchell’s prose, and I love his characters, but now that I’ve read all of his novels, I think I don’t really love his books as much as I should. The last one on my list was The Bone Clocks, which I tore through, as I have with every novel he’s written, but which once again left me kind of cold when it came to the story. Of his eight published novels, I think I’d say I truly liked only four, and even Cloud Atlas was probably more a respect and appreciation sort of ‘like.’

The Bone Clocks is a two-layered novel that brings back the body-snatching spirits who appear at least in passing in every one of Mitchell’s novels except for Black Swan Green. It turns out that there are two sorts, the Horologists and the Anchorites, and they’re waging a war across all of time because they differ in how they view humans – as hosts, or as food, to put it in the simplest terms. Rather than just follow these disembodied entities, however, The Bone Clocks instead follows a number of characters, notably Holly Sykes, across decades and around the world as they live their own complicated lives while often serving as unknowing vessels for Horologists. Holly is the closest thing to a central character here, as she appears at the start of the book as a rebellious teenager who finds out her boyfriend of a few weeks is actually sleeping with her best friend, which leads to a series of unfortunate events that put her on the path of the spirits, coincide with the disappearance of her younger brother (who appears to be autistic), and give her what she thinks are visions for much of the rest of her life. We also meet a group of obnoxious upper-class twits at a college that’s supposed to be like Cambridge and a bad-boy author named Crispin Hershey who’s on the downswing of his career, before eventually getting to the heart of the book, the battle for all things between the two disembodied groups, before concluding in a grim post-apocalyptic section that recalls the middle section of Cloud Atlas in setting and tone.

I just can’t get into the Horologists stuff, and Mitchell is fully invested in it, bringing them into almost every book of his, often shoehorning them in somewhere they don’t belong (Utopia Avenue). I enjoy the way he reuses characters and places, or inserts other references to his previous works into new ones, but for someone who writes such lovely, evocative prose about reality, he spends too much time in this unreal milieu. Mitchell captures much of the human experience as well as any contemporary writer, especially grief and sadness, so jerking the reader out of whatever emotions he’s created to go spend time with Marinus or Esther Little or the Mongolian or whoever does the work no favors. There’s a good novel here in The Bone Clocks that just follows Holly Sykes through her highly eventful life, but he’s written her a story that’s inextricable from the Horologists’ narrative.

Slade House is the ultimate Horologists/Anchorites novel for me – it’s a horror story and a thriller and at its heart it is just about those beings. There’s one focus there, so you’re not divided between a very real world and Mitchell’s fantasy environment. And Black Swan Green works the other way; with no mystical mumbo-jumbo, you just get a beautiful coming-of-age story, rendered in fine detail by Mitchell’s eye and pen. Even Utopia Avenue got most of the way there, as the spirits appear just once, in a brief section that you could probably skip and not miss at all. Since that’s his most recent novel, I’d like to think that it’s a sign that he’s getting away from the Horologists & Anchorites and might just continue to write straightforward novels – with lots of callbacks and other references, sure, but perhaps grounded in a single plane of existence instead.

Next up: John O’Hara’s Ten North Frederick, winner of the 1956 National Book Award for Fiction. O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra is one of my favorite novels of all time.

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→ December 14, 2022
→ By

The Wonder.

The Wonder is another adaptation of a book by Emma Donoghue (author of Room), directed by Sebastian Lelio (Una Mujer Fantástica, winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film), and starring Florence Pugh. It has no reason not to be good. And it is good, imperfect but good, taut and spare and well-acted, with Pugh, who seems very unlikely to get any awards love for her performance, showing once again what a compelling talent she is.

Set in 1862, The Wonder tells the story of Elizabeth Wright (Pugh), a nurse who is called to an Irish village where a young girl, Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy), appears to have been fasting for four months, requiring no food or sustenance, subsisting solely on prayer. Her Catholic family wants to believe she’s blessed by God, as does the local priest and several other town authorities, although there’s enough disagreement that the triumvirate of local leaders (Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds, and Dermot Crowley) have called in Mrs. Wright and a nun to watch over Anna for two weeks, taking twelve-hour shifts to determine whether she’s for real or is somehow sneaking or being given food. An Irish journalist with a questionable past (Tom Byrne) shows up as well, and he’s even more skeptical than Mrs. Wright is, but it’s unclear if or how Anna and her family might be pulling this off.

The Wonder isn’t really a film about religious mania or doubt, although those themes are there below the surface, but about the way in which adults use children – and, really, all manner of people – as objects to advance their own ends. The religious leaders and Anna’s own family are so invested in the possibility that her survival without food is the product of divine intervention that they’re willing to overlook signs that she’s dying, even ignoring the protestations of Mrs. Wright that the girl needs food. The nurse herself has a past of tragedy, telling Anna’s family that she’s widowed but leaving out several other details from her history, and it turns out the journalist is doing the same, leaving both of their motivations here open to question as well.

Of course, you can’t read this without seeing an implicit indictment of religion’s capacity to harm and kill, and the way that people will turn to religion, even with that capacity fully on display, in times of strife. The novel and film are set in the wake of the Irish famine caused by a potato blight that led to the deaths of about a million Irish people and the emigration of two million more, a time where you might think that people would ask why God had abandoned them, especially given the island’s history of dedication to the One True Church of Rome even as their overlords in England tossed it aside for divorce and other heresies. Instead, we have a family and a town clinging to that faith as fiercely as ever, impervious to material explanations and physical evidence of harm (as when Anna spits out an entire tooth, a sign of malnutrition), turning even more deeply into religion even when any rational person would see a person surviving without food for four months as a physical impossibility. The script doesn’t dwell much on the science versus faith battle directly, instead pitting the rationalist nurse against the nun and the spiritual leaders as a stand-in for that debate, which had just exploded on the world with the publication of On the Origin of Species just three years prior to the film’s setting.

This film is nearly all about Pugh’s performance, with a strong assist from Cassidy. Pugh has become one of those “whatever she’s in, I’ll watch, unless Olivia Wilde directed it” actors, and while she’s not going to get any awards consideration for The Wonder, it’s certainly worthy of it. Her portrayal of Elizabeth as a skeptic who’s dealing with her own secret pain and finds herself geographically and socially isolated in this small Irish hamlet is compelling and credible, and her interactions with Cassidy’s Anna are the best parts of the movie. The film overall feels a bit small for awards attention – its only nominations so far were from the British Independent Film Awards, where it earned twelve but only won for Original Music – and that might be why Pugh’s been overlooked in a very packed category. I’ll give this the highest praise I can give a film, though: I was never bored, and what’s more, it took me a while to figure out what might be going on.

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→ December 10, 2022
→ By

Stick to baseball, 12/10/22.

I’ve written a lot for the Athletic over the last two weeks, reacting to:

Over at Paste, I wrapped up everything I played or saw at PAX Unplugged last weekend. That board game convention is why I didn’t run this post last week, of course. I’ll have my best new games of 2022 post up this upcoming week.

On my podcast, I spoke to Prof. Scott Hershovitz, author of Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids, about his book and some of the big themes in it. You can buy the book here, and you can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

  • Esquire has the story of Robert Telles, former Clark County Public Administrator, now charged with murdering the Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter who exposed his misdeeds in public office.
  • Mississippi, a backwater region in the American South that ranks 50th among all states for health care, 43rd in education, and 49th for its economy, took funds from a federal program aimed at helping poor families with children and used them to pay for volleyball practice facility at Southern Miss that Brett Favre had promised to pay for. They also paid $1.1 million from the same program to pay Favre for services never performed. In a functioning democracy, there’d be at least an investigation in the legislature into current Gov. Tate Reeves (R), but Mississippi is gerrymandered into oblivion and has disenfranchised 15% of Black residents, giving Republicans a supermajority in both houses, so nothing will happen.
  • ProPublica normally does great work, but they ran a garbage story about the debunked lab-leak hypothesis for COVID-19’s origins, and it was rife with obvious mistakes.
  • There’s a ridiculous anti-vax film circulating online, called Died Suddenly, which is so shoddy that it claims that people who are indisputably alive actually died from the COVID-19 vaccine. Other anti-vaxxers are attacking it, saying it’s hurting their (bogus) cause. If you want more information on the various lies of Died Suddenly, much of which focuses on false claims of blood clots, you can find a lengthy takedown here on Science-Based Medicine.
  • Grant Wahl, an acclaimed and respected soccer writer who has been an outspoken critic of the World Cup and the human rights abuses taking place in Qatar, died last night at a World Cup game. He was 48.
  • A lobbyist for a Saudi alfalfa company that has been has been elected to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, where he would have influence over a dispute about water usage in the state. Thomas Galvin’s employer grows alfalfa with scarce water in Arizona and ships it to Saudi Arabia to feed livestock there.
  • Michael Harriot dismantled the defenses of Jerry Jones after a photo emerged of the Cowboys’ owner, who has never hired a Black coach, at the door of a school in 1957 where white students blocked Black kids from integrating.
  • Why does the media continue to take billionaires at their word? Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried … they promise things that the media just accepts without question, and then don’t deliver, or it turns out they were lying.
  • Speaking of which, the forces trying to get public funding for a new stadium for the Titans have made a lot of big promises of economic returns. Turns out they’re probably exaggerating.  
  • Back in high school, Frank LaRose, Ohio’s Secretary of State (R), “willed” a classmate “a rope and a tree” as part of a series of racist jokes he and friends made in the class yearbook.
  • Shake that City!, a sort of roll-and-place puzzle game from Alderac, is also fully funded with four days to go. You shake a device with nine cubes in it and they come out in a random pattern that tells you how to place the related tiles on your board.
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→ December 2, 2022
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Music update, November 2022.

A shorter playlist this month, although that doesn’t quite reflect the month in music, since a number of artists on this list released new albums in November. The next music posts from me will be my year-end albums and songs rankings, which I’ll probably run the week of December 19th. As always, if you can’t see the widget below you can access the playlist here.

SAULT – God in Disguise. SAULT released five new albums on November 1st, offering them as a free download for five days through their site, but they’re also now all on streaming platforms. I haven’t even gotten through two of them, but there’s far more of the soul, funk, and R&B influences that were all over their first four albums and absent from this spring’s Air.

Metronomy – It’s Good to Be Back. So this song came out earlier in the year, and I missed it, only hearing it because the cover of the song done by the punk band Panic Shack showed up on my Spotify Release Radar. The cover borrows the basic chord pattern and vocals, but it’s nothing like this shimmering, sunny pop track. When Metronomy stays on the right side of the line, they put out some great pop melodies.

White Reaper – Pages. Just about anything new from White Reaper is an auto-include for me. These Kentucky garage-pop stalwarts will release their fourth album, Asking for a Ride, on January 27th, but it sounds like their core sound hasn’t changed one bit.

Black Honey – Heavy. The third single ahead of their upcoming third album, A Fistful of Peaches, due out in March, this is less abrasive and more melodic than “Charlie Bronson” but still harder-edged than most of their first two albums.

Jamie xx – KILL DEM. Still no official word on a follow-up to 2016’s In Colour, which included two of the best songs of the decade in “Loud Places” and “SeeSaw,” although this is Jamie xx’s second new single of 2022. It’s more EDM than either of those tracks from In Colour, both of which slowed the tempo down for more melody and vocal elements.

Phoenix – All Eyes on Me. Also on my to-do list is Phoenix’s new album, Alpha Zulu, which came out in early November, although every song I’ve heard has brought their Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix heyday of effusive indie-pop to mind, and it feels like a step forward after 2017’s Ti Amo.

Crawlers – Too Soon. Another heavy, grimy track from this Liverpool quartet, who just released their first EP, Loud Without Noise, at the start of November, featuring this track and “I Don’t Want It.”

The Wombats – Good Idea at the Time. Yet another solid track from the leftovers EP Is This What It Feels Like to Feel Like This?, which has songs that didn’t make the cut for February’s Fix Yourself, Not the World.

shame – Fingers of Steel. A post-punk band from south London, shame (stylized in all-lowercase) will release their third album, Food for Worms, in February. The track has clear roots in early post-punk but with more elements of post-hardcore music like that of Quicksand or Thrice.

Weird Nightmare – So Far Gone. The debut album from METZ guitarist Alex Elkins, also called Weird Nightmare, dropped back in June, and he’s already back with another new track, which continues in the same vein of garage-pop that’s more melodic than METZ’s stuff.

Panic Shack – Meal Deal. Remember when I mentioned Panic Shack up top? Here’s their latest single, a raw, wryly comic punk song with some de rigueur commentary on consumerism.

STONE – Money (Hope Ain’t Gone). I exclude EPs from my year-end album lists now, but I will say STONE’s debut EP punkadonk is one of my favorite records of the year. It’s just five tracks, but this one and “Waste” are both excellent, and the Liverpudlians show some range here beyond just pure punk.

Venomous Concept – Voices. I’m not usually into super hardcore punk, but this song is on the accessible side of that genre, and the band is interesting, as it was founded in 2004 by former members of Brutal Truth and Napalm Death and once included Buzz Osborne of the Melvins.

Wheel – Impervious. This Finnish prog-rock act released a three-song EP in November called Rumination, although there’s no word yet on a new album.

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→ December 1, 2022
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A Burning.

Megha Majumdar’s debut novel A Burning became a surprise bestseller in 2020, shortly after its release, catching fire (pun intended) in part because of a page-turning narrative and terse chapters that keep the pace moving. It’s a well-written book, crafted as if by a far more experienced writer, but a simple plot and poorly developed characters make it a less satisfying read than other novels with similar themes and settings.

A Burning revolves around three characters in Kolkata: Jivan, a teenaged girl who aspires to the middle class; PT Sir, her former physical education teacher who finds himself rising quickly in the ranks of a Hindu nationalist party; and Lovely, a hijra and aspiring actress whom Lovely is teaching to read English. When Jivan witnesses a terrorist attack on a train near her home, she posts some anti-government comments on Facebook, and finds herself arrested and charged as an accessory to the crime. Lovely could serve as her alibi, as Jivan was with her right before the bombing took place, and PT Sir could be a character witness. Yet they both find that helping Jivan would hurt their own aspirations. PT Sir has gained this status with the party by serving as a witness against various defendants in criminal cases, claiming he saw them commit the crimes in exchange for a small payment and increased favor. Lovely seems to be falling for some kind of predatory scheme aimed at would-be actors, but when a demo reel she posts to WhatsApp goes viral, she’s suddenly famous for that and her connection to Jivan’s case.

The book is gripping, and extremely hard to put down; I read it inside of 48 hours, even knowing more or less what would happen to Jivan. The short chapters keep the book humming along, and the prose itself is clear and concrete. There’s little here beyond the purely descriptive – we don’t get a lot of inner monologues and there are no characters of any note beyond the main three. It’s a just-the-facts novel, almost like an old detective story, which makes the book feel urgent throughout.

There’s also some unsubtle commentary here about upward mobility in modern India, a society that has seen rapid growth of its middle and upper classes in the last 30 years, but that still has an enormous underclass that measures in the hundreds of millions of people. That backdrop may explain how, or why, two otherwise moral individuals, neither of whom had any real status prior to the terror attack, would consider throwing away the life of someone they knew just to help themselves. PT Sir comes across as venal, but Majumdar gives Lovely enough of a back story to depict her with nuance, as someone who survives, and has always had to grab any lifeline she sees.

However, there’s not a lot else going on below the surface, starting with Jivan. She’s less a character than a victim of fate and circumstance, bobbing along on the surface of an ocean she can barely see. She’s an object of pity, and Majumdar gives us just a sliver of her life in flashbacks, as a journalist interviews her, somewhat covertly, for a profile in a tabloid newspaper. They’re not that illustrative of why Jivan is in the situation she’s in, because Jivan didn’t actually do anything wrong – her Facebook comments weren’t even that inflammatory, and it’s a little hard to believe she’d end up charged with a capital crime for them, although that’s probably part of the point. It’s mob justice dispensed by a religious plurality operating with the power and impunity of governmental authority.

The religious divide in India forms a key subtext to the novel, although it doesn’t show itself directly much in the content. Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister since 2014, is a Hindu nationalist and member of a paramilitary group aligned with that ethnocentric philosophy. Since taking office, he’s overseen the passage of laws discriminating against the country’s large Muslim population and Muslims trying to emigrate to India while also revoking the special status of the disputed Jammu and Kashmir regions. PT Sir’s political rise is tied to a Modi-like politician whose party also espouses Hindu nationalist aims, so Jivan, a Muslim girl, is a convenient target for them, a way to stoke outrage and try to drive voters to the party, just as the current Republican Party in the U.S. is targeting LGBT people, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, and so on.

That reduces Jivan to a prop, a useful plot device without much agency or complexity as a character, and that’s ultimately what led me to feel like A Burning fell short of the mark. It’s such an easy, fast-paced read that it’s understandable why it became a bestseller, and it has the veneer of a Very Important Novel. It’s more of a facsimile of works that deal with similar subjects, like the novels of Arundhati Roy or Salman Rushdie, without their thematic depth or character development.

Next up: After finishing Scott Hershovitz’s Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids, I’m reading my friend Eden Robins’s debut novel When Franny Stands Up.

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→ November 29, 2022
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Top Gun: Maverick.

Unlike many people my age, I hold no particular nostalgia for Top Gun. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the movie start to finish, and I have no desire to do so now. I remember the girls in middle school loved it for Tom Cruise, and the guys loved it because pew pew pew airplanes. You also couldn’t escape the soundtrack, which ranged from tolerable (“Danger Zone,” which was 20+ years from its real cultural import, as a Sterling Archer catch phrase) to insufferable (“Take My Breath Away,” by an emasculated Berlin). The movie was a huge commercial success, but critics remained unimpressed.

So when Top Gun: Maverick (rentable on amazon) was first rumored, I admit to some strong disinterest. The sequel to a movie that wasn’t supposed to be all that great 36 years ago? Tom Cruise may not really age, but come on. Dude’s 60 now, right? Is he only allowed to fly the plane before dusk? Will this just be another stop on the “make Miles Teller happen” tour?

Of course, the movie is very good. It’s a popcorn blockbuster, and has its moments of absurdity, starting in the cold open, but it is fun, well-paced, often smarter than its ilk, and gives us some real moments of character development without resorting to schlock or excessive fan service. I was shocked by how much I enjoyed the film just about from start to finish, and if you chop off the unnecessary and ridiculous opening sequence – where Maverick (Cruise) absconds in a fighter jet to fly it at Mach 10, which is about three times faster than any manned plane has ever traveled, just because “ten” sounds cooler than “four” – it has just one eye-rolling moment the rest of the way.

Maverick is in the film’s title, but the script makes quite a bit of room for other characters, including the son of his former colleague Goose (played by Teller). Maverick is more or less given one last case before he retires, as he’s drafted to lead a crash course of a dozen elite young pilots to identify a few who can engage in a secret mission to destroy a weapon in an unnamed country. The weapon itself is located in incredibly inhospitable terrain, at the bottom of a valley surrounded by very high, steep peaks, so flying in and out requires skill, timing, and endurance. As movie challenges go, it’s a pretty good one, and evokes without actually naming a certain country we’ll be playing in football later today. The group of wannabe aces includes Teller’s Bradley Bradshaw, who thinks Maverick is the one who tried to stop his naval career; Hangman (Glen Powell), affably arrogant but also very much a team player; Phoenix (Monica Barbaro), the lone woman in the group, who is often the voice of reason and exudes a sort of quiet confidence; Bob (Lewis Pullman, son of Bill), nerdy – you know this because he has glasses – but of course highly skilled; and more. Maverick has to figure out who can handle the mission’s demands while also figuring out why Bradley is still so mad at him, and, of course, he has to deal with higher-ups (including Jon Hamm) who question his reliability and willingness to follow orders.

What Top Gun: Maverick does right, better than most films that aim for such a broad audience, is avoid the worst cliches of the genre. There’s a love interest between Maverick and Penny (Jennifer Connelly), but it’s deeply understated, and the most serious moment between the two is both unromantic and important to the plot. The younger pilots are a little thinly drawn, but the script takes them seriously as people, and Phoenix isn’t just there as someone’s love interest. We never even see the enemy, which is good as it avoids depicting them in stereotype, but also mirrors modern warfare’s remove from the people it’s killing (for better and worse).

Maverick also comes across as a man of a certain age, and that might have been the most surprising part of the film. Top Gun: Maverick lets its title character stare into the abyss, however briefly, and it is a much stronger film for it. He’s a bit too perfect, as the story seems to think he hasn’t lost any reaction time despite the character being at least in his late 50s, which is definitely not true to life, but there’s a wisdom to the character, and a reserve as well, that befits the character’s age and experience.

Of course, the script goes well over the top in two pretty significant ways. The opening sequence is scientifically preposterous, while the big plot development later in the film, where Maverick and Bradley have to work together to survive, just beggars belief. You can get past the first one, because the story them moves into the actual plot, but the second one blew me right out of the film, and made everything that came after seem artificial.

The other way this film goes over the top is in its pro-military bent. Like most movies that include the U.S. military as part of its story, Top Gun: Maverick received substantial assistance from the U.S. armed forces, and they were allowed to make subtle alterations to the script. It’s not a propaganda film per se, but the film is full of propaganda. The U.S. military looks good here. There’s no mention of, say, the civilian casualties that often result from U.S. airborne operations in foreign countries – to say nothing of the violation of sovereignty involved. Navy good, enemy bad. It doesn’t quite devolve into the level of a recruitment video, as some critics charged, but you’d have to cover your eyes to miss the military’s guiding hand here.

There’s talk of Top Gun: Maverick getting an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, which, sure, fine, it’s not going to win, and whether it’s worthy depends a lot more on what other films are contenders. It should get a slew of nominations for technical awards, as well as one for Best Cinematography, one for Best Film Editing, and perhaps two in the sound categories. Anything more than that, like an acting nod for Cruise, would be overkill. This is a perfectly enjoyable movie on its own merits. We don’t have to overpraise it to appreciate it for what it is.

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