Courtney Barnett - Things Take Time, Take Time

Courtney Barnett's got an x-factor - her previous stuff makes that clear - but this album doesn't.

Other Worlds Than These edited by John Joseph Adams

An anthology including both 'portal fantasies', a la through the wardrobe into Narnia, and 'parallel worlds' stories inspired by quantum physics. Consistent high quality across the collection is impressive. 

MVP is Kelly Link's "Magic For Beginners", an exceptionally well crafted long story that's about stories in a way that's meaningful, fresh and emotionally resonant - not to mention magical, with a strong undercurrent of threat and the sinister. (good analysis here)

There are a lot of clever stories here, many of them unpredictable and satisfying in their reversals and landings, and it was nice how many of them ended with versions of a happy ending (or at least not a specifically dark one). Over and above that, a few that felt to me like they had some of the real stuff: Seanan McGuire, "Crystal Halloway and the Forgotten Passage"; Pat Cadigan, "Nothing Personal" (one of the only ones that made me wish I could read more about its characters, weary detective Ruby Tsang and interdimensional interloper Rafe Pasco); Joyce Carol Oates, "The Rose Wall"; Paul Melko, "Ten Sigmas" (not actually that profound but just so well done with its repeated splitting-offs to follow diminishing numbers of possible selves as their probabilities diminish through the choices they make in attempting to save the girl), Yoon Ha Le, "Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain".

Into the Inferno

Werner Herzog and volcanos, though the Cambridge volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer who functions as guide is just as important a figure in the documentary. Vanuatu, Antarctica, Ethiopia, Iceland, North Korea, and back to Vanuatu.

Lydia Loveless - Daughter

Middling, especially when (inevitably) compared to the heights she's reached before.

Biffy Clyro - The Myth of the Happily Ever After

A real roaring rock album, and as close to hardcore as I'm likely to get; reminds me of Cave In. Every song's an anthem and a bunch of them hit particularly hard. Special mentions to "DumDum", "A Hunger in Your Haunt", "Errors in the History of God" (the 'we are trolls' song) and "Haru Urara".

Aaron Lee Tasjan - Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan!

Not especially notable singer-songwriter fare with retro overground 60s/70s folk stylings. "Up All Night" is good though.

"A Miracle Constantly Repeated: Patricia Piccinini"

Taking advantage of the reopening of the Flinders Street Station ballroom and the corridors and rooms connecting to it, an installation of around 20 of Piccinini's distinctive works, some of them substantial ie occupying entire rooms.

It's good, of course - the art, the setting, and the interaction between them. A bit of a sentimental streak running through several of the pieces that I hadn't noticed in Piccinini before but in retrospect is pretty clear - and also not necessarily at odds with the ideas that she's working with, including the relationships between humans and the worlds we live in (ecological, technological, scientific, familial).

The descriptions and explanations provided by Piccinini (audio tour or in writing via app) were illuminating too.

"Sapling"

"No Fear of Depths" - the child is modelled on Piccinini's daughter

"Celestial Field"

"La Brava", in the foreground of the actual ballroom

(w/ R, J & H)

Strong Female Lead

This really brought back that time in Australia's political and social history and brought home again how appalling the treatment of Julia Gillard in public - and private - discourse was.

Tori Amos - Ocean to Ocean

I enjoyed checking back in with Tori after so many years, and there are some pleasures here - "Addition of Light Divided", "Speaking With Trees", "Spies", the general reminder of how great she is and how large a part of my life those first half dozen albums of hers have been.

Taylor Swift - Red (Taylor's Version)

When it comes to Taylor Swift, Red is the big one for me. This re-recording is overall a bit more organic sounding - which means a touch less shimmer and production, which takes the tiniest bit of sparkle from tracks like "State of Grace" and "Red" (though of course I'm biased towards the versions I've come to know so well) but gives a subtly new, more grounded dimension to others like "I Knew You Were Trouble", 'We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" and "Holy Ground". Also interesting hearing the changes in Swift's voice in the nine years since its original release.

Also included is a generous selection of Red-era songs which I'm not enough of a completist to spend a lot of time with, but I enjoyed "Better Man" (an original not a Pearl Jam cover) and the 10 minute version of "All Too Well" (although I think the more concise original cut does a better job in conveying the song's drama, with its clearer and more conventional builds and peaks).

The War on Drugs - I Don't Live Here Anymore

I Don't Live Here Anymore is a marginally cleaner-sounding and more concise version of the War on Drugs, but really only marginally. If not quite so epic as Lost in the Dream and A Deeper Understanding, it's still plenty widescreen, and good.

Pistol Annies - Hell of a Holiday

Pistol Annies have released a Christmas album and somehow it's a natural fit; nothing groundbreaking but a good time.

Faye Webster - I Know I'm Funny haha

Woozy country 'n' lounge sounds.

Lauren Groff - Matrix

There's a mystical quality to Matrix which is apt given its surface subject - the life and works of visionary 12th century abbess Marie (in England, though born in France), from being sent to the abbey as prioress at the age of 17 by Queen Eleanor of Aquitane to her death many decades later, having overseen the abbey's growth and flourishing over that time, often in defiance of both Rome and the crown. 

But that mystical quality, of mystery, ellipsis and sliding truths, arises more from the combination of style and setting that Groff produces, in an impressive departure from the thoroughly contemporary mode of Fates and Furies and her short stories - the novel sustains a third person present tense voice in which Groff's characteristic flights of language are part of the structure, at once defamiliarising and evocative, for rendering an alien historical and cultural setting legible,[*] and more to the point the vision (of another kind) that it creates of a female-centred society, kept apart from the rest of the world and constructed as an extension of Marie's own will and self, and the associated - chewy - ideas it therefore puts into play, around female-ness, power, and the construction and costs of the uses of both.

I found it very easy to become lost within Matrix. I never knew exactly where it was going - although her late-in-life realisation about her own pride was a mild disappointment in its familiarity - but it has a strong sense of story and Marie's inner life is clearly depicted. I imagine there are plenty of anachronisms in its depiction of its historical period, but that seems besides the point given the nature of the act of imagination that the novel enacts. It feels a bit like a fable - aphoristic maybe - and it's unafraid of nuance; I wondered whether there would be a reckoning for how Marie treat Avice and her pregnancy, and the novel is explicit about the ecological cost of the various massive engineering projects that the nuns complete in consolidating their power. I also found it pretty moving, especially Marie's relationships with the various significant women in her life (Eleanor and Wulfhild in particular).

[*] A possible compare and contrast, and a book that it slightly reminded me of, is The Buried Giant - although Matrix's setting is in fact several centuries more recent, being the time of the Middle Ages, the Crusades, Richard the Lionheart vs the post-Arthurian Dark Ages)

Ursula K Le Guin - The Lathe of Heaven

A man finds that some of his dreams - those he calls 'effective' - are changing the world, not in small ways but comprehensively, by rewriting the entire course of history (human at the very least, seemingly planetary also, and very possibly beyond even that if the iterating appearances of the aliens are anything to go by - although the strange insight they appear to possess into this effective dreaming is a wrinkle suggesting a different character to their subjectivity) to create a new present-day, with no one other than Orr himself being aware of the replacement. The novel moves through its scenario and its ideas and implications without any unnecessary texture, as Orr's treating psych Haber discovers what is happening and seeks to use the phenomenon to better the world, and successive attempts succeed or fail to lesser or sometimes very much greater extents. It's an older style of sci fi I suppose, and it's effective.

Brit Bennett - The Vanishing Half

The Vanishing Half never stumbles as it moves back and forth between decades and points of view, beginning with a seemingly external omniscient perspective that centres twins Desiree and Stella - or, at least, their absence - and opening out as it goes, and ultimately organised more around Desiree's daughter Jude more than any other individual, as well as the effects of racism, trauma and male violence. 

I'd avoided it because the kick-off premise - two twins leading separate lives, one passing as white, the other living as Black - seemed too pat. But Bennett brings it to life and does much more with it besides.

The Beths - Jump Rope Gazers

Jangle, fuzz and melody, that old trio. From NZ, which figures. Best is the title track which is probably the purest pop song on here.