Sprezzatura

When I was a kid we would drive from north Mitcham to Bellenden Road in Peckham, near my mum's old house, to buy Jamaican patties, hard dough bread, and guava jelly. There was a mural at Goose Green in East Dulwich, near journey's end - not that weird, there's obviously plenty of graffiti in London - that always gave me the creeps. It seemed to be a depiction of a normal village green, much like the one it stood upon, but there was something distinctly Wrong with it. The simple, bright colours read as completely unnatural, almost sickly, and for some reason an explosion of light emanated from the tree at the centre. It didn't help that the mural was scarcely visible from Adys Road as we drove to the bakery, partially shrouded by a couple real trees, bathed in amber from the old sodium streetlights you used to get (because by the time we got to Peckham it was always night). It made the mural feel like something I had imagined or fever-dreamed, half-asleep and up past my ...

I really don't wanna write about 100gecs, man. I don't even want to listen to them, let alone listen to them enough times to form a a cogent opinion. It was one of those things where you all went mad one summer and as a result I though it would be best to just avoid the whole album. Unfortunately, there's not anything remotely as interesting that happened that year, our last year of freedom, our last year of normal. Everything I look at on year-end best ofs, as I do when an album to write about isn't immediately forthcoming, is part of a different narrative, as I suppose you'd expect at the end of the decade.  really not relevant this week so im getting it in well early, but a bit is a bit, folks fka Twigs came up in the same wave as the James-Blake-y SZA-y "PBR&B" phenomenon I touched on in 2011 and 2012, even though she really doesn't like the term. Angel Olson, like St. Vincent, came up backin others, like My Morning Jacket, before really comin...

I hate the 1975. If you follow me on Twitter you already know that, but it's been a while since they've done anything and it always bears repeating. The only good attempt at a defence of The 1975 I've read came from, I think, Steven Hyden: the 1975 are important because there need to be big, fun, hateable rock bands. I see the logic in that: people have to play SOMETHING at parties, and weirdo kids like me need SOMETHING to rebel against. But do them Wilmslow cunts fit the bill? Big - probably the biggest in England, only Arctic Monkeys could really fight them on that. Hateable - my lord, yes. But fun? If I'm remembering rightly, two of the first three songs on their recent album Notes On A Conditional Form  are a plodding orchestral overture and a song where Greta Thunberg tells you to stop littering. Not exactly Van Halen- or Aerosmith-esque party animal good times. And I'm pretty sure Guns 'n' Roses never released an eighty-minute double album full of UK ...

"And I ain't much to hear" - Shame, 'One Rizla' "Lay off the fucking post-punk, all of you" - a friend reviewing 'This Nation's Saving Grace' by The Fall I find the rehabilitation of Brutalism as an architectural form really strange. The current consensus seems to be that everyone is wrong to think massive brown buildings completely incongruous with the surrounding architecture are ugly - witness the invocation of Trump , the most famous idiot in the world, in this piece, for example - and that people simply don't understand how gorgeous they truly are. Brutalist buildings receive elegies on BBC Radio 3, the poshest channel, and we're subjected to headlines like  To Some, Boston City Hall Is An Eyesore. To These Artists, It's Inspiration.   All of this completely misses the point, though. Brutalism is bad because Broadwater Farm erupted in rioting and Ronan Point erupted in flames, because Brasilia rapidly became an overpopula...