WRITINGS & NEWS
Fuzz guitars and angelic vocals are crowding the bottom part of this list, and I'm not bothered. I have a type of song that hits that little pleasure nerve in the brain, and this song, with its soaring 80's synth breaks layered on top of a grizzled guitar lick, taps that button over and over again. By the time a clean electric solo line flows over the top as English sighs “I can't measure up to this girl you thought you knew,” I'm all the way in.
We're in the middle of a brief Facebook trend of putting your top albums from your teenage years up, and it is nonsense. I know that we tend to see our past selves through rose-colored glasses, but apparently everyone on Facebook has reimagined themselves as characters from a Nick Hornby book, squirreled away in their room listening to The Replacements on vinyl. This is ridiculous.
The first Now You See Me movie was, for a chunk of its run time, a fun romp, with its thrill cut short by just a dickens of a bad ending, its twisting who-done-it plot leading only to empty air, deflating everything fun about the movie that had come before. In most movies, I'm much more worried about the journey than the destination, but a good heist needs a solid prestige at the end, and this one made the mistake of laying down its cards to reveal it was bluffing the whole way along. I won't ruin it for you, but-
Okay, yes, I will. That movie is garbage. You're better off.
Michelle Zauner, former frontwoman for Philly lo-fi punk rockers Little Big League, moved back home to Oregon to be with her Korean mother as she slowly succumbed to cancer. After she passed, Zauner spent time shining up her formerly raw releases into shinier pop tunes, and released them under the name Japanese Breakfast.
The album's a thousand different expressions of the things zipping through Zauner's head, and "Everybody Wants To Love You" launches in with a raw strum of electric guitar and distant firecrackers before exploding into dreamy keyboards and ethereal vocals, a punchy soft-punk anthem about seduction and marriage that floors its way through verses and choruses and a guitar solo before crashing to a finish two minutes and twelve seconds in. Zauner is capable of accomplishing a hell of a lot in not a lot of time.
Where I Found It: Andy Greenwald's Best of 2016 List
This is the movie I kept encouraging people to go out and see. Not because it's good, because it is decidedly not good. It is impressively not good. It is in fact so bad it seems like at several points decisions were made with the specific intention of being terrible. And that's what makes it so fascinating.
