a couple of perfect things
(In case you didn’t know, this newsletter has moved almost entirely to Patreon, hence why there have been no actual updates since July. However, in celebration of the first post of the year, and the first post of meaningful length in who knows how long, it seemed correct and good to share the entire post with a wide audience for once. Hope you enjoy it!)
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this idea of “scoring” pieces of art; quantifying enjoyment of something based on a variety of factors and then giving it a hard-and-fast grade or number that indicates how enjoyable we found that art at the time. The older I get, the more I understand this impulse, despite still thinking of it as deeply silly. Over the last few months I’ve started an evening ritual— I have two journals, and in one journal, I write a brief description and evaluation of my day in addition to at least one thing I have gratitude for, and in the other journal, I log the media I consumed along with a star score out of 5. It’s surprisingly satisfying being able to look back at what I’ve watched, read, played, or listened to and reviewing how I felt about it at the time, like a living history of my pop culture experience.
One thing I’ve noticed, though, is how shockingly mutable these scores tend to be. I’ve looked back on things one, two, three days later and completely revised my score on certain things, particularly albums, which can go up or down whole star rankings depending on how much something really stuck with me. But something that has really surprised me has been how little my opinion changes once I decide to give something a 5-star score, which I’ve admittedly only done a few times thus far this year.
When we give something a perfect score on our personal grading scales, that can mean a lot of different things depending on who you are and what your standards are for perfect. For me, I’ll give something up to 4 or 4 and a half stars if it superbly accomplished everything it set out to do to the best of its creator’s ability, and I liked the results a lot. I would give a record 4 and a half stars if it’s technically flawless and consistently enjoyable. But sometimes — maybe even often— the things I give 5 stars have a few small but noticeable flaws. And I think the thing that sets them apart is that they feel like extremely, maybe even achingly human. I couldn’t imagine those 5-star albums or TV seasons or movies or books without those inexplicable hiccups. They’re part of the firmament.
Over the course of this past month— the first month in the year of 2023 — I’ve given 5-star ratings to four things (that I’ve experienced for the first time, mind; I also logged a 5-star rating for an album I’ve heard before, Tiger Trap’s self-titled album). These things are: Sunrise Patriot Motion’s debut album Black Fellflower Stream; Belle & Sebastian’s seminal If You’re Feeling Sinister; the teen comedy Honor Society; and the first four episodes of the new Rian Johnson/Natasha Lyonne project Poker Face.
I’m going to start with the Belle & Sebastian album, because I am pretty sure that most readers are going to be really surprised I’ve never listened to it before. It’s not that I hadn’t heard any Belle & Sebastian ever. They’re inextricable from the foundation of modern indie rock and I think anyone in my age range who is into the Indie Music Canon will have soaked up some of their music by osmosis. And, in fact, I was so taken aback by this album that I asked myself “have I been missing out on them this entire time?” and immediately listened to The Boy with the Arab Strap, which was a pleasant but ultimately underwhelming experience.
But the thing about If You’re Feeling Sinister is that it’s so unguarded, it completely catches you yourself off guard. I work at an animal hospital, and when I’m at the front desk, I often can’t listen to much of my more intense music, so I have to build up a solid backlog of things that are acceptable to listen to in a waiting room but that A. aren’t just the radio and B. don’t make me want to gouge my eyes out. Usually this means shoegaze, IDM, jazz, playlists of Adult Swim bumps, alt-country, and the Twin Peaks soundtrack. (Yeah, I do realize that I have just become the “aging hardcore kid” stereotype, and that’s fine.) The other day, on a whim, I decided to go on something of a jangle pop kick, and settled on If You’re Feeling Sinister as my first pick since I’d never heard it in full before.
I know I’ve been vocal about how, in my opinion, certain subsets of indie tend to mostly produce tasteless mush, the auditory equivalent of plain oatmeal. For a long time, I was comfortable slotting Belle & Sebastian in that category; in my mind, they were directly descended from the school of Beat Happening, one of the most truly boring bands that has ever existed and one I spent far too much time trying to convince myself were worth getting into. The thing is, though, B&S are directly descended from Beat Happening. The difference is that they actually have songwriting talent. My wife likes to clown on Stuart Murdoch’s downbeat, almost quaintly morose vocal performance, but I think that belies his enthusiasm bubbling just below the surface, a sort of infectious euphoria that gives all the proceedings a sense of atmospheric giddiness.
If You’re Feeling Sinister consists of wave after wave of pop pleasure. Every twee affectation, every moment of hushed yet urgent intensity, every bit of twink librarian lyrical snark, coheres into something as earnest as it is ironic, as heart-on-sleeve as it is playful. And goddamn are the songs catchy. Every single track has at least one repeated refrain it will leave you humming. The songs, though far from Beat Happening’s irritating faux-childishness, do possess an air of deceptive simplicity, as each jangly guitar line, each tinkle of piano keys, each melodic horn line, each hyperactive drum shuffle doesn’t at first appear to be contributing to anything approaching pop majesty. Give each song enough time, though, and that’s exactly what you get: overwhelmingly sweet, lovable pop songs that stick to your ears like bubble gum and somehow leave you feeling both more innocent and more world-weary than when you started.
In some ways, that’s similar to the feeling you get listening to Sunrise Patriot Motion’s debut full-length, Black Fellflower Stream, but for entirely different reasons. The side project of members of underground black metal darlings Yellow Eyes, Sunrise Patriot Motion traffic in a blend of overwhelmingly bleak and oppressive black metal with the swirling pop guitar melodies and psychedelic tinges of 80s goth and post-punk, a style that seems to be coming into vogue over the last few years (see also: Lamp of Murmuur). Interestingly, Black Fellflower Stream also includes elements of chiptune in the mix, which is always a welcome diversion.
Yellow Eyes records have been known to feature extremely loose concepts that follow an obsession to its logical endpoint, and Black Fellflower Stream is no different in this regard. This album is about a man who comes to believe, while in the midst of a manic episode, that if he digs down far enough within the field the album takes place in, he will reach oil. That single-minded howling intensity finds purchase within the album’s fraught vocal approach, equal parts hauntingly melodic and ferociously raw, almost mirroring melodic hardcore in its balance of the two aesthetic tonalities at once. As for how the album actually feels, sonically— well, as I’ve been breathlessly recommending it to people, the question I’ve been asking is, “Have you ever wanted to know what it would sound like if The Cure recorded an album in hell?”
(The band cites Killing Joke, Lifelover, and even Motörhead as touchstones here, but it’s hard not to hear The Cure in the densely layered and nightmarishly blissed-out guitar swirls anchored by driving, pop-minded bass melodies. If Pornography is The Cure’s most viscerally frightening album— a Phil Spector album in hell— this is Pornography on a steady diet of A24 horror and St. Vitus shows.)
Ultimately, Black Fellflower Stream evokes nothing so much as the putrid stench of late-stage capitalism— a manic urge to dig deeper and deeper for profit even at the detriment of yourself and the world, an unhealthy fixation that sickens the soul and salts your wounds even as you can’t stop yourself from hoping desperately for just one more drop of the good stuff, constructing an economy from addiction. Maybe just as much as capitalism, maybe inextricable from capitalism, that’s what Black Fellflower Stream is about— the powerlessness of a human in the face of abject dependency and obsession.
It would almost be depressing if the album wasn’t so catchy and compulsively listenable, even at its most chaotic and overwhelming. There’s a sense of controlled calm about the whole affair— the dedicated hyperfocus at the heart of the mania, the eye in the middle of the storm. Try as I might, I can’t think of anything else I’ve ever experienced quite like Black Fellflower Stream.
I can’t quite say that about the next thing on my list, the breezy high school comedy Honor Society. It’s a teen comedy, made exceptionally well. Honestly, part of me was starting to worry that they weren’t making movies like this anymore. The fact that I didn’t catch this until months after its release due to its inauspicious debut on the Paramount+ platform didn’t exactly help this perception.
The thing that sets this movie apart from its forbears and its many would-be 90s/00s throwback contemporaries— with the exception of the truly phenomenal Do Revenge, one of my favorite movies from last year— is its authenticity. I don’t necessarily mean that the characters sound particularly realistic— but these days, in a world of constant performance for ourselves and others, does anyone?— but in the sense that it really functions as a perfect snapshot of what it looks like to develop empathy, what it looks like to be rewarded for that and what it looks like to be punished for it. Yes, it’s obviously very heightened and to some degree cynical about high school social dynamics (and to what degree any teenager can realistically manipulate them), but that cynicism and heightened reality slowly crumble as our protagonist becomes broken down by her connections to others, and more grounded.
This is all to say that this movie certainly feels like a normal high school flick for much of its runtime, but again, like Do Revenge, there’s a pretty phenomenal twist that recontextualizes both the characters and the movie around them in fascinating ways. This movie is, make no mistake, full of traditional high school movie tropes and cliches, some of which it embraces, others of which it subverts, and still more of which it somehow does both, but it’s one of the few movies that seems to be taking palpable glee in doing so. I can count on two hands the movies or shows over the last 10 or so years that have successfully managed to both accurately represent the high school experience and ruthlessly fuck with the audience at nearly every turn, and aside from this and Do Revenge (which I promise I will stop bringing up at some point), the only other thing I can really think of is the first season of American Vandal. Honor Society isn’t anything special at all, but what it does within that framework is genuinely remarkable.
And finally (last tortured segue, I promise), that’s also exactly how I’d describe Poker Face, a show that takes the traditional howcatchum structure most popularized by Columbo and does absolutely nothing to innovate upon it, while simultaneously being one of the most ambitious and compulsively watchable shows I’ve seen in quite a while.
Rian Johnson has earned his spot as one of the most beloved auteurs in the mystery genre, and certainly the sharpest auteur working predominantly within that framework currently (give or take a Kenneth Branagh or two). I think most people still link Johnson most directly with The Last Jedi, but his sci-fi endeavors have really historically been the exception in his ouvre rather than the rule, going all the way back to the fantastic teen noir Brick, which took what Veronica Mars had been doing and reversed the polarity. Hell, even his most beloved episodes of Breaking Bad— “Fly” and “Ozymandias”— have more pulpy crime and noir (and, yes, Western) in their DNA than anything approaching sci-fi or fantasy. The massive successes of Knives Out and Glass Onion have only served as punctuation.
I would have had faith in this show’s quality even if it had only had Johnson at the helm, but with Lyonne as the co-pilot, Poker Face truly sparkles. Her inimitable voice and vibe and overall coolness— an ineffable yet instantly identifiable quality to her demeanor— is impossible to divorce from her character and the show as a whole.
Refreshingly, after the first episode or two, there’s very little need to actually watch the series in sequential order— there’s a small arc, I’m sure, but both Lyonne and Johnson have been outspoken about their desire for the show to be primarily episodic— and Lyonne’s Charlie provides a more-than-capable anchor to the proceedings as an effortlessly likable character who we genuinely want to see succeed, and, importantly, who we can genuinely believe is this quick to connect with people wherever she goes. Without Lyonne’s charisma, this show would not go as far as it does. Poker Face debuted this past Thursday with four episodes, and the other six are set to premier on a weekly basis. I’ve not been this happy to wait a week between episodes in years.
So that’s what I’ve been most excited about lately. How about y’all? What’s getting everyone else hyped? How is that adaptation of The Last of Us going? Would you believe it took everything I had to not sarcastically exalt Velma as the best adult animated show I’d seen in years? (In point of fact, that show is such a bitter disappointment— like ashes in my mouth— that I am considering writing about it at some length, but literally who on earth wants more content about Velma right now?)
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-xoxo, Ellie