Why no melancholy?

Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty is quite possibly my favourite Disney animated feature. However, what makes me love the film is a subtext that may not be at all intended. The main thrust of this is that Maleficent is the most intriguing, complex, and powerful villain to ever grace an animated film, and none of the ostensible heroes of the film are anywhere near as interesting. Anyway, I’ll get on with it and elaborate as I go.

coming on to it I wasn’t sure what I was looking at

2 Foot Flame: 2 Foot Flame

The musicians involved in 2 Foot Flame come from art backgrounds and this is very much an art project.

solely in my chest is my heart a drum of water

School of Seven Bells: Alpinisms

Having listened to Secret Machines’ 2008 self-titled album made it clear that Benjamin Curtis had absconded from the band with all their atmosphere and mathematical complexity.

I’d rather die than give you control

Nine Inch Nails: Pretty Hate Machine

Five years later, Trent Reznor would plunge steel meathooks into the great industrial beast and drag its agonized hulk into the present, with a sound of barbed wire, chain links, and corroded machinery, a skull full of disease and blood spatter.

It’s rough out there, high water everywhere

Bob Dylan: Love and Theft

Sometimes an album gathers an historical relation that does not fit it. On the morning of September 11th, 2001, I got up at seven-thirty and walked to school, for the first day of my first full week in university.

Somewhere impossible light still shines

Ryan Adams & the Cardinals: Cardinology

The random, frequently garbage youthful eclecticism (or less charitably, casting about for direction) that marked (and often marred) Ryan Adams’ older albums has by this point pretty much entirely departed.

care not for whom they play The Turk

Fiery Furnaces: Blueberry Boat

When Gallowsbird’s Bark came out, its humid old South eccentricities overtook me like a summer fever and it simmered in me for months.

I never doubt your possibilities, please let go of my sleeve

Kyuss: …And the Circus Leaves Town

…and so the mighty Sabbath was reincarnated, displaced from its rainy Birmingham roots to the blazing psychedelic heat of California’s Palm Desert.

what were we hoping for?

Bloc Party: Silent Alarm

I am of two minds regarding Silent Alarm. It is either exactly what I want to hear or it really grates on my nerves.

haven’t u ever heard of the healing power of laughter?

Prince: Batman

What really fascinates me about Prince’s songs for Tim Burton’s Batman movie (you know, beyond the fact that someone at Warner Brothers thought ‘Yeah, Batman and Prince, that’s a winning combination!’) is that these songs show that Prince’s impression of the movie is rather bizarre and incomprehensible.