Archive for January 2011
“The Wild Hunt”
Posted by: danhartland on: January 18, 2011
- In: albums | music
- 5 Comments
Let’s get this over with: Kristian Matsson sounds a bit like Bob Dylan. It’s the sparse acoustic instrumentation and the literate songwriting, for sure; but above all it’s the nasal bray, the insistent attack of his vocal delivery. The comparison no doubt drives Matsson, who records under the moniker The Tallest Man On Earth, crackers [...]
Perception is Reality, Neophyte
Posted by: danhartland on: January 17, 2011
- In: Politics
- 2 Comments
Over the weekend, it was increasingly easy to tell that the Labour Party have invested in some press people. In December, Ed Miliband appointed two stalwart political journalists, Bob Roberts and Tim Baldwin, to his communications team, and their effect is already being felt: it’s not, frankly, that Miliband is saying much of anything that [...]
Here’s Another Clue For You All
Posted by: danhartland on: January 13, 2011
I’ve been dipping in and out of the late Ian MacDonald’s Revolution In The Head, on face value a simple recording history of the Beatles’ songs, but in fact much more. MacDonald is a perceptive and bold critic, and particularly good at making conceptual links (his book is subtitled The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties). [...]
Albums of 2010
Posted by: danhartland on: January 4, 2011
- In: albums | music
- 9 Comments
Last year’s top five albums held up surprisingly well in my memory: if I’ve returned to Midnight At The Movies or California as much as I have to Merriweather Post Pavilion, it is for simpler pleasures than the sometimes demanding latter can offer. To this end, I’m brutally omitting great albums from 2010 from this [...]
SF: 2010
Posted by: danhartland on: January 3, 2011
My thoughts on 2010 in Science Fiction are up today at Strange Horizons. So, too, are the reflections of the rest of that organ’s host of thoughtful reviewers. The three works I mention – Patrick Ness’s Monsters of Men, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell, and Deboarah Biancotti’s A Book of [...]
71 is the number of an apartment we return to regularly in Whinfell Forest, Cumbria. We like it there.
‘We’ are Anna French and Dan Hartland. The Story and the Truth is a sort of inadequate catch-all term for what goes on here: we tend to talk about novels, history, food and fashion, politics and music, but there may also be photographs of soft toys and musicians. Stick around and see.
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Words We Like
The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
An astounding work of collecting-as-art, this compendium of 800,000 weird words is easily one of the most consistent genre anthologies I have read. Heterodox yet focused, it is fated to be the canonical text of weird fiction studies for some time to come - and deservedly so. The first-rank stories here - and there are many, not a few - are not excellent weird fiction. They are simply some of the best 20th century writing available in any mode. Not without its faults - but that is, ahem, the nature of the beast. Essential.
Sounds We Like
Sonik Kicks, by Paul Weller
I haven't paid much attention to Weller - an artist who hangs heavy in my musical tutelage - since 2000's Heliocentric, an album of diverse interests which felt like a shot of crisp elegance in that year of Steps and 'N Sync. The records that followed it - particularly Illumination - were enough, however, to make those achievements a distant memory. There have been rumblings of a renaissance - 22 Dreams got great reviews - but only the sounds of Sonik Kicks have brought me back. Energetic, fierce and, best of all, creative, this sounds like a record from a much younger man. Weller has a lesson or two in him yet.
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