Cassandra Jenkins - My Light, My Destroyer

It's a delightful surprise that My Light, My Destroyer is so marvellous - cosmic, electronically-inflected rock/pop/etc that doesn't shy away from either a clear hook or an ambient interlude. "Hard Drive" was magical but of the kind that felt like a one-off; it turns out that Jenkins has plenty more up her sleeve. This whole album feels like a dream, or maybe more accurately like everyday life wrapped in something dream-like.

(An Overview on Phenomenal Nature)

Mannequin Pussy - I Got Heaven

Great fun - by turns blaring, shouty, fuzzy and melodic (and sometimes all of those at once).

Kelly Link - White Cat, Black Dog

Kelly Link has got her claws into me now. These wily, elegant stories always play fair but are never predictable. In them, one thing happens after another, each sentence says what it means, yet what it all means is puzzling unless you really pay attention and make an effort to put it all together afterwards. Each one takes a fairy tale as its starting point and the familiarity of the stories embedded in the source tales - whether or not one is familiar with the specific fairy tale itself - contributes to the uncanny, slipping feel of Link's takes on them, something that's probably true of all her fiction but in particular relief given the overt links to those foundational folk stories and narratives of the ones in White Cat, Black Dog. Most notable for me are "Prince Hat Underground" (the second time recently I've run into 'East of the Sun, West of the Moon') and "Skinder's Veil", both particularly multi-layered, and the relatively more straightforward "The White Road" and "The Game of Smash and Recovery".

Camera Obscura - Look to the East, Look to the West

It's like they never went away.

Beth Gibbons - Lives Outgrown

This is greatness. Dummy was released 30 years ago and time has revealed it to be a truly great album, and Portishead and Roseland NYC Live too have retained their aura all these years on. I assumed they were done, the occasional solo side project or guest appearance notwithstanding, and then came Third, a marvel I hadn't anticipated in any way (a bit after that I saw them live, a genuine highlight). And now, more than another decade on, this solo album, which is equivalent in quality to anything of Gibbons' that's come before it without being in anyway a retreading of old ground. It's one of those records that feels genreless (there are folk elements, and electronic ones, but it feels inadequate to describe Lives Outgrown by reference to terms like those), by turns hushed and stormy, quietly dramatic while perfectly controlled.

Hellenic Museum

Bits and pieces with connections to Greek (or Hellenic) culture - a historical survey, other ancient/classical items, an exhibition about Lord Byron's role in the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire, a small series of Bill Henson photographs with ancient artifacts ("Oneiroi") and a bunch of 'self-portrait as goddess' textile doll/sculptures by Adrienne Doig. Plus an AI-enabled encounter with an 'Oracle' and three striking 'well behaved women' painted by Loretta Lizzio on display outside.

(w/ Hayley)

NGV x 2

A couple of recent visits:

Pharaoh

I've always been distantly intrigued by ancient Egypt. Probably a lot of it's down to western exoticisation, but still. When I think about the specific landmarks in my personal history, the number is very small and I couldn't say that all of them even particularly marked me: an early computer game that somehow made it on to my dad's work computer; Pratchett's Pyramids; a few different encounters at MONA and especially "Kryptos"; and most recently Kelly Link's "Valley of the Girls". Anyway, it was enough for me to visit this exhibition, which was - for me - mildly inherently intriguing and had a bit of a wow factor at times, but didn't leave much of an impression.

Grace Crowley & Ralph Balson

I wasn't really in the zone to absorb this one properly, though the colours were appealing and it was a bit interesting seeing the different modernist (abstract) art styles washing through their work over the decades.

Nina Sanadze

I liked these - monuments, sculpture, and public space.

Others

A bit of time in familiar galleries at both the NGV International and Australia, although the former is much more static. Time with those old friends: the Rothko and de Chirico especially. And a new one - Tim Maguire, "Light fall I-VIII" (2011), cropped, magnified images of flowers and fruit.

Gabrielle Zevin - Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Super readable and written with a style and fluidity that makes it easy to understand why so many people have liked it. It's entertaining and I wanted to know where it was going, but the treatment of the characters and themes ultimately felt overly simple.

It felt YA-adjacent, which isn't a criticism on its own terms, but didn't cohere with the apparent ambitions of Tomorrow to say something meaningful about 'adult' relationships over a lifecourse at least up to middle ageish.

Atomic Blonde

Oddly it's James McAvoy's performance that's most stuck with me from the previous viewing but perhaps that's a function of how completely Charlize Theron embodies and creates the hyper cool mood.

Jessica Pratt - Here in the Pitch

A brief, beguiling collection of songs that sound like they escaped from the 60s and arrived mostly intact but with just a trace of their time travelling passage remaining. I see I used that same word, beguiling, when talking about her On Your Own Love Again but it's the one that comes to mind - these songs wrap you up, mesmerise, whisper, seduce. Yet there's nothing twee about them. Instead, they stand strongly in their own lines, insisting on their self-ness. I like it a lot.

Tana French - The Hunter

Another good one, continuing the 'Irish Western' conceit of The Searcher complete with the prospect of gold in the hills and centring both Trey and Lena Dunne alongside transplanted Chicago cop Cal Hooper, which is a good choice. The depiction of Ardnakelty and its wily, slippery community is the highlight, embodied especially in Cal's neighbour Mart - French is very good on the unspoken communication and codes of rural (semi-remote) village life and the dangers it poses to those who step outside accepted behaviour, without ever slipping into faux-gothic mode. 

I could've done without the sustained dramatic irony of Trey and Cal working at cross purposes for much of the book, but it did have the effect of highlighting the way that personal 'codes' can drive choices and behaviours, potentially tragically - and some of the later twists were satisfying surprises, especially the revelation of the murderer, which was a nice thematic contrast and complement to The Searcher's resolution.

English Teacher - This Could Be Texas

This is a blast and a stand-out, defying easy description while being immediately catchy in its melding of sounds and styles. The strongest through-line is a kind of contemporary take on post-punk that's apparent in the rhythms, choppy guitar, sing-song vocal bits and general energy, but filtered through layers of successive indie and general art-pop-accessible-weirdo vibes, not the least among them Life Without Buildings (always a touchstone) and especially, in that case, on "Broken Biscuits" and "I'm Not Crying, You're Crying" which both feel touched by a bit of genius to me. 

There's peaks and anthems all the way through This Could Be Texas, the relatively conventional pleasures of storming choruses (exhibit A, "The World's Biggest Paving Slab") and massive crescendos (including huge closer "Albert Road") mixed with more jagged and unpredictable turns, guitars doing things that stretch a bit in the noise direction in moments, and - towards the end - stretching in a different way towards dream-pop melody ("You Blister My Paint").