Patty Griffin - Tape

Home recordings and demos, but there's an unsurprising consistency to them. Generally it's the ballads that come through most clearly in this sparse format, but the quality is uniformly high as it always is with Patty Griffin. She's just so good.

Fanny Lumsden - Hey Dawn

Neat country + other-influences record with plenty of nice moves.

Jessie Ware - That! Feels! Good!

This is a high quality album, apparent if in no other way in how it wears the clothes of disco so completely and winds up sounding like a bunch of classic tracks rather than pastiche, homage or appropriation. But honestly not really my speed, much as I've enjoyed Ware's previous work.

Nope

Really great. A strong vision - imaginative, philosophical, visual - and unafraid to tackle its subjects head-on in all three of those senses. Clear themes running through, without being over-determined. Maybe the first sci-fi Western I've seen? (Other than Firefly / Serenity) And with much more on its mind than even the richness offered by the melding of those two already highly allegorically/symbolically resonant genres.

Barbie

As much as the pre-release marketing made it clear that Barbie's aesthetic would be pretty different from that of Lady Bird and Little Women, those two previous films of Greta Gerwig's were both so flat-out stunning that I was more than willing to follow her here. 

So - it's an entertaining film, the gender politics are basically good, the way it reckons with capitalism less right-on, and those two (gender/capitalism) aren't wholly separable when it comes to Barbie/Mattel. What that means for how you score the quality and success of the film probably depends a bit on one's starting point (as a mainstream blockbuster with impressively subversive elements, or as the latest offering from an indie 'auteur' that's compromised by its corporate connection), and how much of a handicap one allows given the need for the actual Mattel to in some sense approve the film's release. 

All up I think it's a pretty impressive achievement - it speeds by without ever obviously getting tangled up amidst its many different elements, and pretty much creates its own emotional and imaginative reality (and therefore stakes), although I did reflect afterwards that while the Barbies are clearly characterised as having agency, their actual subjectivity - and interiority - was fuzzy, making the film a bit less emotionally engaging than it might otherwise have bee.

(w/ R)

Georgia O'Keeffe (Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza)

Her greatness is as clear as ever. Even in reproduction.

The Witcher season 3

There's something a bit kooky about The Witcher, something unusual in its tone. It's pretty fun still - though maybe beginning to drag a bit compared to its first two seasons.

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - Weathervanes

Maybe I just really like Jason Isbell nowadays. Or maybe he's really that good. Either way, Weathervanes is a solid hour of high quality songs that are just as strongly in his voice as all his other ones, while feeling like a natural evolution at the same time - airier and more textured, a breath more rambling, maybe overall a bit mellower, than what's come before. I feel it in my chest. 

The front end, from "Death Wish" and "King of Oklahoma" through to "If You Insist", is particularly strong but it sustains the whole way through to epic closer "Miles". 

So good - each new album lands in its own right, and the back catalogue doesn't diminish over time (in fact the opposite - reading back over what I wrote about each of his albums at first encounter, all except the most recent in Georgia Blue have grown further on me since then).

Southeastern (2013 / 2014 for me)
Something More Than Free (2015)
The Nashville Sound (2017)
Reunions (2020)
Georgia Blue (2021)

The National - First Two Pages of Frankenstein

The National are certainly a vibe, and maybe it's devolved into one that's a bit relentlessly tasteful at this point, through no fault of their own other than consistency. You get the sense they know it too. And still, the music they make, it's still good. Frankenstein doesn't have the taste of revelation to it, but there's just enough variation, and enough songs that stand out from the throng, to have had its share of listens in recent months.

Shirkers

The appeal of this memoirist documentary for me was probably about 40% the early 90s 'alternative' youth culture milieu, 30% the indie and arthouse-film luxuriation (90s and otherwise), 20% the intrigue factor that Singapore holds for me (vague but real) and 10% the actual animating events of the older man who drew these talented, young women into his orbit, saw them produce what by all accounts may have become a genuine landmark in cinema, then disappeared with the raw cuts of the film itself.