Ranking Cocteau Twins is difficult for a slightly strange reason. It’s not because the catalog is huge, and it’s not because there are embarrassing late-career detours to sort through. The hard part is that Cocteau Twins albums don’t divide neatly into masterpieces and misfires. They divide into different kinds of sonic weather. One record is…
Some novels might include a dream scene, while others can feel like they were built by a mind that no longer trusts daylight. That’s the territory I’m interested in here. Not the quick symbolic dream tucked into chapter seven. Not the tidy nightmare that foreshadows a death or confirms a fear. I mean books where…
Neo-soul is one of those genre labels people use while also looking slightly suspicious of it. That suspicion is fair. “Neo-soul” can sound like a record-store tag that got promoted into a worldview. It can group together artists who are doing very different things with soul, jazz, hip-hop, etc. And a lot of the musicians…
Read a bit of Polish literature and you can jump from a big nineteenth-century realist novel full of class anxiety and social ambition to a book that treats adulthood like an elaborate humiliation ritual, then move into a contemporary novel where murder, astrology, William Blake, animal ethics, and a very stubborn narrator somehow all fit…
Some writers mention music to set a scene, whereas Ralph Ellison treated music as a way of knowing. That difference matters. With Ellison, jazz is not just atmosphere. It’s not there to make a room feel cooler, or to place us in a certain decade, or to signal a particular kind of urban sophistication. Jazz…
Ranking Dostoevsky is not an especially sensible exercise. You are not just ranking “good novels” in the usual way. You are ranking breakdowns, confessions, guilt spirals, ideological meltdowns, spiritual crises, and several hundred pages of people talking themselves into and out of catastrophe. Even his smaller books tend to contain at least one idea, monologue,…
This post is part four of a Melodic Margin series for people who do not quite hear themselves as country listeners yet. It takes the scenic route through the genre until the music starts sounding bigger and more alive than the stereotype allows. If I had started this whole series here, the pre-album period with…
This post is part three of a Melodic Margin series for people who do not quite hear themselves as country listeners yet. It takes the scenic route through the genre until the music starts sounding bigger and more alive than the stereotype allows. One of the easiest ways to misunderstand country music is to skip…
This post is part two of a Melodic Margin series for people who do not quite hear themselves as country listeners yet. It takes the scenic route through the genre until the music starts sounding bigger and more alive than the stereotype allows. If the modern-country guide was the first crack in the wall, this…
This post is part one of a Melodic Margin series for people who do not quite hear themselves as country listeners yet. It takes the scenic route through the genre until the music starts sounding bigger and more alive than the stereotype allows. “I don’t like country” is one of those music opinions people often…