Ada Lea‘s ‘hurt’ on the album one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden has a line in it which goes ‘get on a bus back to Montreal’. I’ve thought a lot about the genius of this line ever since I heard it. One one level, it speaks to me personally, because […]
August: Music and cricket for a lockdown
Going into higher gear. The Low Mays’ 人生贏家2: 明星生活 (Life Winners 2: Popstar Life) – I once wrote about the band here and their track about Flat Earth. I’ve since watched an interview and am convinced these five (six?) Hong Kong men are just taking the piss and they do it well. The autotune on […]
Listening in July: anniversaries, ‘oldies’, and favourites
July was the 20th anniversary of The White Stripes’ White Blood Cells. Listening to the album brought back memories of seeing Jack White in Montreal and the crowd going crazy over ‘Seven Nation Army,’ the song whose riff gets sung out in unison for no reason during hockey games. It also brought back memories of […]
Chinese rap, bubbles, and political everything
“Asian” Hip-hop I watched VICE’s first episode of their second season of Minority Reports. Titled ‘Hip Hop’s Reckoning with Asian Rappers,’ the half-hour show in my opinion tackled the easy, or at least obvious, questions. Easy in the sense that cultural appropriation (which VICE angled as appreciation through their choice of footage), Rich Brian’s first […]
My Greatest Invention – Dawes
This is the last in a series of posts on my musical year in 2018. Today, I talk about something by Dawes. I admit I fell off the Dawes bandwagon a little bit after 2016’s We’re All Gonna Die. It had too much bite, masking a little bit of Taylor Goldsmith’s excellent song-writing. In its restraint, Passwords […]
Joel Mak 