girl in red - if i could make it go quiet

This is kind of fun but I guess I'm too much not the target audience - it has no stickiness at all for me.

Kathleen Edwards - Total Freedom

Turns out it was eight years between Edwards' previous album Voyageur - which has had real staying power - and Total Freedom, which dropped last year. Flashy it isn't, but its high quality is unforced, and it still sounds like her, just eight years or so on.

Star Trek, Star Trek Into Darkness & Star Trek Beyond

Disposable but well made entertainment, with a light enough touch and sufficiently believable stakes.

Previously: 1, 2, 3.

The Great season 1

The easy formulation would be The Favourite (with which it shares a creator) crossed with Marie Antoinette but The Great develops a more layered human-ness than those - excellent - predecessors over its 10 episodes. For all of the colourful world-building, present-to-past anachronism, zippy dialogue ('huzzahs' and 'indeeds' galore) and outright grotesqueness, it feels almost like the show can't help itself in fleshing out the characters and relationships at its centre as it goes - especially between Elle Fanning's Catherine and Nicholas Hoult's Peter, who are both wonderful creations from actors who evidently know what they're about in performances that are both deliberately mannered and seemingly natural in a way that makes them recognisable.

Julia Stone - Sixty Summers

Jumps around across styles but never quite lands. Best is the somewhat oddity of the French version of "Dance" at the end.

Kishi Bashi - Omoiyari

When you know that an artist is capable of a perfect song, and especially by working basically their standard vein rather than through some kind of out of the box different mode - and Kishi Bashi is, as evidenced by the joyous "Manchester" - it's hard to not hope for a reprise ever after. Omoiyari doesn't have any individual heights to match that earlier peak (from 151a), but it's fairly terrific in general - sweetly melodic, textured, lightly orchestrated pop music which I enjoy most in its most dramatic and violined moments.

serpentwithfeet - Deacon

♫ "Me and my boo wear the same size shoe" ♫  Great song.