Here’s a quick one. I’m traveling home this weekend, so despite my newfound unemployment I didn’t have a ton of time to write this week. I actually wrote/am writing this whole thing on Thursday afternoon, so if something earth shattering happens in the news this weekend and I don’t mention it in this post, that’s why.
So, how about those Olympics? Canada is having a pretty disappointing showing so far. These are the sports we’re supposed to be good at, dammit! I’m not exactly a patriotic guy, but as I’ve discussed before, sports viewership is the one situation where patriotism becomes fun. Honestly, cheering for Team Canada in Hockey or Curling or whatever is one of the only times it feels like Canadian identity even exists. But so far we’re blowing it. Hopefully Marie-Philip Poulin can get back in action before we have to face the US again, because that last game was embarrassing.
I think I really might not have anything to say about Baseball this week. Chris Bassitt signed with the Orioles, that’s nice. The Orioles really needed some pitching action. I don’t think I would be satisfied with just Bassitt if I was an Orioles guy, but I mean, it’s better than nothing.
Oh, and Fransisco Lindor fucked up his hand. That sucks. It would be a huge bummer if the Mets ended up having a cursed season after already going through such a dramatic “it’s so over/we’re so back” cycle of departures and signings this winter. I think I’m pretty close to just calling the Mets my National League team. I really want to see them pull it together.
Here’s a new segment. I’m unemployed now, so I’ve decided it’s time to tackle my Letterboxd watchlist. It’s a big list, built up over a few years. I’m just going to start picking stuff off of there with a random number generator every night I have time to watch a movie.
This week I watched “From Beyond.” It’s an adaptation of a Lovecraft story, and I really genuinely do not remember why I added it to my watchlist. I probably saw somebody compare it to “Hellraiser” and said “cool, I like Hellraiser.”
It was a good time. Just like a wacky swinging for the fences horror movie with some great, extremely wet practical gore effects. It’s sort of like if “Hellraiser” leaned way more into the psychosexual stuff, but also if Pinhead was a big wet dork instead of a cool scary guy. I was surprised to find that it came out before “Hellraiser,” and around the same time as the novella “Hellraiser” was adapted from. I guess 80s horror perverts were just thinking a lot about bizarro sex monsters?
Anyway, next week’s Movie Minute will feature more than one movie, but as I mentioned above, I didn’t have a ton of time for blog stuff this week.
Joji’s “Piss In The Wind” is music to listen to while asleep. It is music to listen to while looking at something interesting on your phone, or to throw on as ambiance at a sort of lame party. In short, it is 46 minutes of lofi beats to relax/study to.
As a vocalist, Joji rarely does anything other than croon or mumble. He always sounds at best bored and at worst half asleep. The instrumentals behind him do very little beyond exist, carrying their sappy chord loops with minimal effort, all plodding eighth notes and molasses drones. The only interesting musical flavour we’re ever treated to is a fuzzed out bass on select tracks, but as somebody who has heard Neutral Milk Hotel before, this did not exactly blow my mind. The songs are all too short to develop into anything, seemingly designed to slide off your brain.
There are two exceptions to everything I just said. “Past Won’t Leave My Bed” is a serviceable pop ballad that basically gets by alright by just borrowing every pop ballad convention. It’s Temu “Without You.” But by the time it came along I was really looking for something to wake me up, so Temu “Without You” worked great.
The second exception is “Sojourn,” which benefits from Dylan Brady turning in a C grade by his standards production effort, and from a pretty solid hook. A hook that was genuinely pretty catchy. In fact, I was pretty sure I’d heard it before. And I had! The hook to “Sojourn” is, to my ears, an obvious rip of the chorus of classic 80s hit “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” by Starship. The similarity is so uncanny that I thought this was one of those major label negotiated interpolation songs for a minute, but Starship isn’t credited at all, so it’s just a rip. Maybe “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” just exists deep in Joji’s subconscious, and he used the exact melodic arc and syllabic structure of its chorus without noticing. But like, typically that’s the kind of thing you or your collaborators catch somewhere in the process. Have Kenny Beats and Dylan Brady never listened to classic rock radio?
I think this album was basically designed to be background noise. These songs are short and underdeveloped; only a scant few of them possess any remarkable details at all. It’s straight up ephemera, like the YouTube video you watch with your lunch, the Instagram reels you watch before bed, or the lofi beats that you relax/study to. Listening to it actively was a legitimate challenge. It is offensively boring. I can only imagine it being exciting for somebody who has never heard 80s pop music, EDM, 90s alternative, or literally any R&B before. Which is to say that it is music for people who do not listen to music.
Rating: ◻