The Tepid Take

Hullo! A week on from the new year and I thought it the best time to cover off the five books that really did a number in me this year. While I read (some) more, with each of these I finished with the feeling that they'd made some contribution to my way of thinking, be it about politics, people, cities, what happens when you die, why William Morris is really great... You know, relatable stuff like that. So let me take you through each of them now - in no particular order. 1. Soft City by Jonathan Raban      This one proved to be shockingly perceptive on themes of place and what makes a city a habitable space to live (or not). Raban writes about London with an affection that's couched in realism. He knows that it has its problems, but he knows those problems aren't necessarily caused by the citizens. He sees scarps of capital but the lived experience made within them is always what shines through. And that seems to be the point Raban is making, that there's somethin...

     Absolutely no shade if you're from a chocolate box town, a financialised city or (god forbid) the countryside. Thing is, we can't all be so lucky. Astride rivers and seafronts in every corner sit towns that have seen better days, home to dastardly half-empty high streets that die at 5 o'clock sharp, eerily quiet industrial estates, suburbs with no character and few amenities save the Harvester. On a bad day, you could tar most towns (and even some cities) in England with this brush. It is an immediate experience, and it's not hard to find; every time I go home, I can find the canal always more brown than green than blue, I can find the shopping trollies and cans and needles, I can find the streets you don't go down because the streetlights have already been switched off.     And yet! Living in London, the city with something for everyone, you start to forget these images in favour of this gleaming cosmopolitanism, pedestrianised streets and pocket parks. Lo...

So... 2024. The year when things didn't really get any better. I mean in society at large, of course, not personally, I'm fine, how are you? Papering over a sense of hyperobject fatigue at the threat of a world war and climate apocalypse all coming at once? Me too! At least we have Bluesky now, eh, horses for courses. But like every year, artists released music and we listened to it. Spotify has of course given us its machine-learnéd supposition of our favourites, but having lived with a computer programmer who works with music databases, I'm no longer convinced that such a bodged-together tier list really holds water. We make our own priorities about the music that matters to us, every day; in moments, things cut through, not just songs but albums, not just .m4as but gigs, listening parties, heck, even journalism. So I like to make my own list of top albums that reflects that sort of stuff for me, and I encourage you to do so too - just like you might list the favour...

The nights are drawing in, 2023 is drawing to a close, I'm drawing a musical blank. Usually it's so easy to reinvoke the albums that meant something to me in the year! I've done it for four years now, each time coming up with a mollycoddle of crap indie and semi-good post-punk/other that may or  may not  be from the year it's supposed to be from.           This year, however, in part thanks to Rough Trade East, and in part thanks to someone with better musical taste than me, I've tried to come up with seven albums from this year, actually from this year  that I think are actually  good... And then three that aren't. Look, need a bit of leeway for the ol' sentimentality. So listen up! Or read on! I really couldn't care less! BLOGGING. 1. Snake Sideways by Do Nothing     Come on Claude, at least start with one that you didn't nick from Rough Trade's list. Okay, here's Snake Sideways, the first full-length LP from Nottinghams...