The eighty-fifth album: #85 The Monkees - Headquarters
We'll be watching the Monkees TV show at some point in the future. Today we get their first real album - the third to be published from the band, but the first they played on and wrote themselves. Of course, from my perspective, I'm now comparing that with the Beatles' album released a week later, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. And while that may not be perfection, this feels like it harkens back so much more to old Beatles material (which I think the Monkees were meant to at least somewhat invoke). It's not until Shades of Gray that it went beyond that, a soft, wistful ballad that sounds a lot more unique - the folk direction working for Jones' and Tork's voices.
The second side of the album works better for that reason. Abandoning the love songs, we get more interesting songs, relying on Dolensz as another strong vocalist who gets more focus and more of a mix of styles. They feel like they show more skill and interest, which is a major help. Sunny Girlfriend sounds like a love song, but is played with a hint of sarcasm that really makes it sound that bit better. And then you get Zilch. A spoken track that overlays the four vocalists each repeating a key phrase, creating its own kind of music that feels unique on its own and may well be my standout track of the album, if only because of the statement it makes of the Monkees as artists and writers. And it explains why I know of Mister Bob Dobalina. Another question answered.
The twenty-eighth classical recording: #629 Igor Stravinsky - Rite of Spring
First performed as a ballet in 1913, this piece of music caused a riot, in part due to its weird sounds. These days, we're used to the relative aggression, although that was not unheard of, but also the lack of standard keys as normally used. It's slightly disharmonious, and that's a sound we need to learn to listen to. With rock and the like, we perhaps already have, but I understand it was new at the time.
It still sounds mad and maddening at times, a big mess that coheres into an aggressive setup, working especially well to evoke the pagen rites it's trying to evoke. There are a lot of more restful moments in there, in between the aggressive sounds. It evokes emotions in a way where I can really imagine how a ballet would give shape to these.
The seventy-second TV show: #701 The Colbert Report
When I covered the Daily Show a while ago, it was to come back to a show I'd seen before, trying to get a bit of a sense of its history. I had not really watched The Colbert Report though, so this was to really get me a new insight.
It takes a lot of work and daring to hang a daily news comedy show off a fake news pundit's imaginary show while skewering those views while staying believable. I believe he's currently doing great in his late night talk show (one I haven't seen yet) where he plays himself, but here the character helps. Where Jon Stewart is the annoyed and weary observer, Colbert is actively in the middle of the news, directing you to observe these views more closely instead of getting annoyed at a distance. It feels unique and centering the conversation work in a way that later follow ups didn't quite manage. By sending up these personalities, their rhetorical tricks become more obvious. Colbert stays funny all the way through, not becomes obnoxious even where that would have been easy - by going too far or staying too real.
The fourty-first comic: #947 Giraffes in my Hair
Here's a semi-road strip story, of a hippy in the 60s kicked out of his house and going on a road trip and other adventures. This leads to Disneyland on acid (well, not quite), reaching to all corners of the US and slightly beyond and there's a rebellious streak in him through a lot of this - mostly drug based and some relatively minor crimes. At the same time, and I'm not sure whether this is intentional, it feels a bit petty - trying to defend a rock star image that doesn't really come through. The stories are entertaining, but I'm not sure my sympathy was always quite there.
One of the things it helps is that it's a good setting for the art, which isn't overly detailed. The charcoal art is simple but expressive enough to tell the story, giving it a more memorable look. It works, here, and makes it more pleasant to read. It's a shame the lettering doesn't hold up near the end - one of those things you just don't notice until it goes bad.
The seventy-first TV show: #669 Veronica Mars
We've just watched the first season of this show and it's been a revelation - we expected we'd enjoy the show, but not to the extent that we did.
There's this stereotype of the CW show - good looking teens dealing with their teen problems, a bit formulaic and not usually high quality. It's meant to pander to the (smaller) audiences that watch it. Regularly, though, it comes through with good series - the Arrowverse shows and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend are two of those examples now, while shows like Supernatural and Vampire Diaries are in the past. This is another one of those.
While there's some teen drama in here, Kristen Bell and the cast around her are good at elevating their roles and adding more nuances to it. The central mysteries of the first season slowly get expanded on, with a lot of pay offs in the final two episodes - the penultimate one through a lot of recurring guest characters and the final one through a more serious, straightforward resolution that is incredibly satisfying.
We're taking the next two seasons on our own. There is so much here, we have to keep watching.
It's Christmas time, and with Christmas come ghost stories. This Christmas, we watched two of the BBC's ghost stories made for Christmas.
The sixty-ninth TV show: #932 The Tractate Middoth
While put in this category (and aired as a horror on Christmas Eve), it feels like this doesn't quite become a good horror story. In fact, the story ends when it feels like the real story is about to start, set up with a lot of warnings, but instead the first act is the full thing. What we get instead is a mystery story, a hunt for a missing will, where a mysterious entity interferes a full time - at the end to make sure the right people get the will. The ominous warnings after it, however, about how it gives a gift that isn't to be trusted, never gets resolved and is instead a cliffhanger that doesn't get resolved. We genuinely wondered if this was some sort of ad break or otherwise a part one, but no - it's only that. If this is the best sample of the revival, it doesn't really work.
The seventieth TV show: #249 The Signalman
Jumping back in time, this is part of the original run that also included A Warning to the Curious. The Signalman's story set up is fairly standard - three warnings that end with the observer's death, based on Dickens' own experiences. It's quite compelling in how it slowly builds its suspense - it's clear what went wrong and sets everything up early, but you clearly don't get quite what's going on until the end. While not horrific and somewhat predictable - I believe I picked up a lot of the story through osmosis - it's well told and builds its curve of suspense really well. Thanks to the limited cast and location, the action stays contained and easy to follow, without it feeling left open further. It's more of a success.
The twenty-seventh classical recording: #741 Maurice Ravel - Bolero
We recently listened to an episode of the podcast Radiolab that, in part, discussed this piece. It repeats the same melody, adding in more instruments and going up as the cycle progresses. The basic melody is familiar from elsewhere, but it starting at a simple point and repeatedly building up from there is what really makes it fascinating. Knowing that mental illness influenced the composer adds to the mystique of the piece, but the build up is fascinating regardless, as coloured as it is by what comes into it being played each time. The repetition really feels enhanced on each iteration, with the instruments bringing their own colour. Fascinating, if odd as a concept.
The sixty-eighth TV show: #569 The League of Gentlemen
Thanks to the anniversary season, I've got a good excuse to write about this show. I watched Inside No 9 early on in the list and watched Psychoville on our own. We also finished watching the series a few months before we started on the TV list, so otherwise this would have taken its time.
When I covered Little Britain earlier, one of the big thoughts was that League of Gentlemen did a lot of it better - a few sketches seemed like direct, but worse copies. Now, some things feel a bit dated (LGBT issues were still being explored), but that's something where there is at least some progress and exploration with the themes they explore with their characters.
The series explores a lot of dark characters and themes, some slightly supernatural, some gross, but mostly brilliantly portrayed and memorable. The most interesting is that where these start off as isolated characters, in the third season the storylines mostly started to grow to be interconnected, creating some interesting interactions and making a more interesting ongoing story.
It's dark, it's funny and it's incredibly well put together. I'd never want to visit Royston Vasey... but I'm happy we got to see more of it.
The eighty-fourth album: #84 The Beau Brummels - Triangle
A lot of the bands we get to now don't have a major contemporary presence. The Beau Brummels don't have a major impact these days and to be honest, it's not that surprising either. A lot of it feels like folk rock, with some psychedelic instruments mixed in - Magic Hollow does sound magical (or, considering the season, Christmassy), but on the whole it follows that genre quite closely. It's done well, but I can't find any real standout tracks or moments in here that truly got me.
The fourty-sixth book: #1003 Metamorphoses - Ovid
Here we have an epic work, trying to catalog myths and historical adventures from the beginning of Roman mythology to the day when, or just before, Ovid was writing it. It's an interesting collection, enhanced by me knowing a lot of these stories, but through the nature of the work sometimes focusing on a different aspect - or probably, most of the time, serving as a primary source. Pretty much all of the stories focus on a transformation happening during it, in several different ways, and while I didn't really go looking for it, it worked out well.
Obviously, a lot of the enjoyment that I get now comes from the translation, as that impacts readability. For my money, I suggest a prose adaptation - while the original would have been poetry, forcing a translation into that doesn't necessarily work, and the stories become more readable this way.