273: I'm going to tell my children that this is Elastica's second album
Hullo.
House
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Byyyyeeee!!!
Out this week – not by me, but Lucas joins Gerry to kick off the official climax of the whole Krakoan Age.
I said right when I started in the X-office that I kind of saw Gerry's X-men as the Avengers to Immortal X-men's New Avengers, in a Hickmanian idiom. I think this is definitely true here. Fall of the House of X is the big-budget -movie overt-fight-against-Orchis book, and I couldn't be happier to see Lucas finally getting to draw some real superhero action.
Next week - RB and me, with Rise of the Powers of X #1.
TRACKS OF THE YEAR 2023
I retired the old traditional opening “an atypical year, but aren't they all” a while back, but this year makes me want to bring it back. This was a weird year musically for me, in that it feels like a break in a way which makes a full breakdown of a Top 40 just seem like a lie.
So I've decided not to do it.
The easy thing to say would be “It's probably been the year when there's been least active pursuit of new music in my life” but that flattens it. Music has arguably been more central to my life than it's been for a while, but just not in the same way. Here's the scratch list I kept across the year, which includes some stuff I loved, and a lot more stuff which I bookmarked and never got back to actually listening to properly. Go have a nose.
Let's also plug some other end of year lists – here's Claire (who Djed at Tbubz with Jules) and Adlai (who threw down at Tbubz, and elsewhere) and Matthew “Fluxblog” Perpetua's absolutely epic one. This won't be the last time Fluxblog is mentioned, I suspect, as he's a patreon I backed as I've found his playlists absolutely essential. See also following things like Fear Of Mu21c on Bluesky, with folks voting and chatting about the best stuff in the 21st century. I decided to resist starting “Is Girl Aloud's Biology TERF-adjacent?” discourse, which shows character growth.
So, if not huge amounts of new stuff, where have I been?
Okay – let's start with Radio, by way of example. Yes, I'm still listening to Radio 6, as some of the things I'm going to highlight shows. Same as last year – that live radio is a connection to the world, and when parenting, that seems to matter. However, prompted by Neil Kulkarni's beautiful piece, I've also started listening to Radio 3. Me. Radio 3.
The biggest single influence was finally starting to listen to Andrew Hickey's A History of Rock Music in 500 songs which I've written about previously – in short, I had put it off for reasons which I could best paraphrase as I Don't Want To Eat My Greens, but I found myself in a place where I actually DO want to eat my greens, and it's been my device for thinking about the structure of the 20th century via the lens of Music, and giving a lot of time to bands who I've only ever had limited or even no real direct experience of. Even bands who I've spent significant time with, I've come away with a different perspective on – I've written before about the Beatles, and my changing experience with them has been comparable to my changing opinions on Tolkien in the process of DIE. In the last few months, I've basically abandoned all other podcast listening in favour of working my way through the backlog, as quickly as possible. At the time of writing, I'm half way through the latest episode, so I'll be tied to its release schedule from now on. I'll be interested how this changes things, and what I listen to.
One of the things 500 songs does has synergised with another aspect of music in my life. I wrote last year about there being a lot more singing, and how I learned to love my voice as much as I love anything about myself (as in, it's mine, and you should try to cherish yourself). This year, there's been a slow accumulation of musical objects around the house, including Iris always enjoying going on C's keyboard and hammering it. And, due to the way my brain works, just being around musical instruments has made me noodle with them, and then google “What is a minor chord”, and start to play around. The synergy is that one of Andrew's filter on rock is the technical one – what is this chord sequence? Where did it grow from? What about this rhythm? And, as I was already playing with the instruments, I thought about trying to use the structures he describe to do my own homages, and I realise that I have Garageband on my phone and...
Basically, I've started making music for the first time since I was 21. Not regularly, but enough that I bought a tiny mid-keyboard to make it a bit easier. There's about 6 or so tracks that were finished enough to lob at various friends for their amusement. And I do mean amusement – they're terrible, but the other thing about art this year is me thinking about the power of just doing art. I still mean to write about AI stuff eventually, but part of the core is that – creating art is just good for you. Its quality really doesn't matter. What matters is the process of creation, and that's why it's good for our spirits.
That said, the experience has also reminded me how I am not wired to be a real musician. I get earworms, so any time I am working on a song, it will inevitably get stuck in my head. There is literally nothing worse that a song that is genuinely awful which is also your song going around and around and around your head at 3am.
But it's fun. I want to do more, though am not always good at carving out the time. The Pixes/B52-1-4-5-4 song whose lyrics consist mainly of the words in the Dinosaur book Iris reads in the bath have been left unfinished for months. And I really am bad. To give you a clue of how bad and naïve I am, it was only in a recent episode of 500 songs where Andrew mentions someone having to rewrite a song to be in the key of your voice which made me realise... wait. You can write songs that match your voice and then they won't sound so terrible.
That was a private expression and a very limited performance (I was tempted to put one song in the list of songs of the year, but that feels unfair, as there's no way I'm going to link you to a fucking MP3. You're all sweethearts, but the world is full of shitheads). There's been a bit more communal performance too. You know that we went back to the decks at Thought Bubble, but that ended up not being enough for us – so Sarah Gordan, Al Ewing and myself have started occasionally throwing parties for friends in London basements. Really small affairs, but also powerful and healing, while also being really fucking dumb. They've gone well enough we're planning to do them in a quarterly fashion from now on. Playing music for friends, with friends, is something which I came to relatively late in life, but I think it's about as beautiful as it gets.
Oh – one last big change. I think this will be my last year using Spotify. It doesn't link to the DJ app I use any more, and I'm damned if I'm going to pay for two streaming services. Plus obviously Spotify has only grown ever more questionable.
So – that's where I am, music wise, and leaves only leaves the list. I decided to do a top 10, of stuff which I'm confident of. I link again to the scratch list, as there's some really good stuff on there I've left off here. As always, the rules are that basically one track per artist (though an artist who I've especially loved will get pushed up a few places, and if an artist is in a collaboration with another, they can both place). Tracks released in 2023, but I'm not above a little cheating.
10) 170 – Anna Erhard
Perhaps the pettiest song I've ever heard in my entire life, yet also weirdly empathisable. We've all been there. It's solely about how fucking sick Anna is with her friend who keeps on saying they're 170cm tall, when they're clearly shortly than Anna. There is no other content at all. It's just an unrelenting examination of how this person is clearly not five foot seven, and Anna clearly is. (“I've met your family... and yes, your parents are both lovely, but they are quite short.”) Inspiring.
9) Dysphoria - Tom Rasmussen
Here's a nod to the club night. Just Djing with folks opens you up to their stuff, and this is one of Sarah's killers. I'm not including The Northern Boys in the list time, but I suspect I should note that the main reason we decided to do it was that Party Time played at Tbubz 2022.) I also cut PJ Harvey to make the 10! I've changed. All bangers, all the time.
8) Grace – IDLES
Well, not all the time, even for a band who are best known for going BANG than making bangers. Bristol's best shouters turn to a gentler serenade of a post-rock. They were always a band who felt intensely Bristol, and with the embracing this electronic pulse, they're even more so. I can't wait to see where they go next.
7) The Trench Coat Museum – Yard Act
The song provoked me to do what I never do, and actually go and read some interviews, to get a little context... which annoyed me enough to actually nearly abandon this. Allow me to paraphrase, from memory, so may just be wrong: basically, he had become recognisable as an image due to his perpetual trenchcoat imaging, and this is the sign off to the period. Which is... NO!!!! It says everything about indie rock that someone actually chances on an actual image people can dress up on, and it inspires a whole song about letting go of that. Wear your trenchcoat, man! Desperately annoying. However, I didn't abandon this, because it's just so fascinatingly lithe and funny, and packed with ideas, like if Losing Your Edge was about Wearing A Trenchcoat. Which, if you think about it, it kind of was.
6) bad idea right? - Olivia Rodrigo
The sort of irritant that always finds a way to my heart. So great an understanding of irritancy that even writing the title is irritating, as it autocorrects to sort out the grammar, so I have to delete to correct it. A+. Also, I'm going to tell my children that this is Elastica's second album.
5) Rice – Young Fathers
This was the year I realised that Young Fathers were actually from Edinburgh. I still can't believe it. Having first seen them support Massive Attack, I presumed they were a Bristol band – and frankly, they still sound like exactly how I'd imagine a Bristol Band should sound in 2023. In an ice-cold year, this was absolute balm.
4) Superglue – Coupdekat
3) Messy in Heaven – Venbee/Goddard
I'm going with just these two, but could have done more. The most influential playlist of the year was Fluxblog's Bubblegum Drum & Base playlist which (being out the music press) introduced me to the Loud LDN scene and associated acts (and sound) which I shovelled into my mouth like Halloween Candy somehow transplanted to summer. I think my absolute faves are On & On and the X&Y Digital Farms Animal remix but both are 2002, but these are absolute bangers (and I had to cheat with Messy In Heaven to get in, but it's a reasonable cheat with it charting extra-hard again in January). They're a good pair, as they basically about the two religions which raised me. Messy in Heaven being about christianity, and Superglue being about assembling warhammer miniatures. I did absolutely end up playing them in the club nights, so fulfilling the terrible 1996 era fantasy of playing drum & Base in a london basement.
2) Last Rotation of Earth – BC Camplight
I'm still relatively late to him, but I've loved BC Camplight since I'm Desperate from Deportation Blues, so enjoyed seeing him carve a bigger space with this album, a whole world in a bedroom studio, set on fire, filmed in slow motion. The title track is as good a place to start, and live a while, for as long as we can.
1) Retributions of An Awful Life – Heartworms
This was a genuine head turns to the speakers moment when I first heard, stalking into my life, an Emily-Aster-pre-personality-bisection banger. In a piece of cross-media comparison which I'm sure would infuriate both people, I somehow file this next to Zoe Thorogood's It's Lonely At the Heart Of The Earth. Not just because of the fondness of the long title, but for the manic-phase depression that screams right through it and sends it soaring bleakly. “Look at me, I can fly” says the Witch Queen of Angmar, soaring above the wasteland, yet never escaping it.
Yeah, these two being my two tracks of the year isn't comforting to me either. The apocalypse feels so close you can almost taste her.
- This 15 minute youtube film about the current state of the competitive Tetris scene derailed my morning for 15 delightful minutes. Humans are an amazing species sometimes though I am 100% worrying about everyone's potential RSI.
- Jim in the Teeth newsletter (in its new Buttondown home) writes bout his things of the year, which includes a big write of his thoughts about DIE RPG. This was really touching, and also striking the angle which Jim brings to it. No-one knows you like people who know you.
I got back to work yesterday, and am still warming up. You hope to come in hard, after the break... but the work I've got to do is detailed and tricky and requires significant thought. I'm finishing off issue 4 of Rise of the Powers of X, which is where everything has to be aligned for the climax of the last five years of X-men stories. No pressure, right?
I've also been planning my schedule for this year, and working out what cons I should consider. I'm seriously looking at Emerald City and wondering whether it's too soon for me to sort out a trip for. I haven't done a US comic con in all the time I've been at Marvel for the second time, so showing my face as Rise of the Powers of X is coming out seems a good idea.
Also, I have to start talking about what I'm doing next soon, right?
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
London
3.1.2024