Since I decided not to post one of these updates last week, on Holy Saturday, we’ve got three weeks of books and music to catch up on today!
Roundup
Music
That said, it’s been a surprisingly quiet few weeks on the music front. The most hotly anticipated album was Robyn’s Sexistential. While I was underwhelmed by it, it’s been getting very strong reviews, so don’t let my opinion sway you against it! There have however been two massive highlights for me. First, there is Raye’s wonderfully inventive, genre-defying THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. In a lot of ways it reminds me of Rosalia’s LUX from last Fall. Both albums push the limits of what we consider to be ‘pop’ and are happy to pull in sounds from all kinds of genres to create something unique, and using vintage sounds in a way that feels fresh and new rather than stale and recycled. But, that said, that same uniqueness means they don’t exactly ‘play well with others’ and I doubt much from this album will make my regular playlists. The second recent highlight is the brand new release from Holly Humberstone, Cruel World. I became a huge fan of hers based off of her 2023 album, Paint My Bedroom Black, and this album feels like a natural progression from that.
Albums
- THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. (Raye)
- Wishing Moon (Wintersleep)
- Sexistential (Robyn)
- The Former Site Of (The New Pornographers)
- The Weight of the Woods (Dermot Kennedy)
- Ambiguous Desire (Arlo Parks)
- Distracted (Thundercat)
- Cruel World (Holly Humberstone)
- Danelion (Ella Langley)
Songs
- “Happier Times Ahead” (Raye)
- “The Best” (Conan Gray)
- “Need Your Love” (OneRepublic)
- “Drunk Dialing” (Holly Humberstone)
- “Sick of Love” (Lykke Li)
- “Sweet Hallelujah” (Royel Otis)
- “Damn Good Actress” (Tiffany Stringer)
Reading
It’s been a really strong three weeks for my reading life, with a lot huge wins, primarily from the backlist. (I’ve bolded the highlights below)
- Offshore (Penelope Fitzgerald, 1979)
- ‘Salem’s Lot (Stephen King, 1975)
- The Afterlife Project (Tim Weed, 2025)
- The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje, 1992)
- It Takes Two to Tumble (Cat Sebastian, 2017)
- Y/N (Esther Yi, 2023)
- She Who Remains (Rene Karabash, 2018)
- Orlando (Virginia Woolf, 1928)
- The Golden Mean (Annabel Lyon, 2009)
- The Man Who Died Seven Times (Yasuhiko Nishizawa, 1995)
- The Lost Gospel of Lazarus (Richard Zimler, 2019)
- Tales of the City (Armistead Maupin, 1978)
- The Blue Flower (Penelope Fitzgerald, 1995)
- The Long Game (Rachel Reid, 2022)
- Strange Buildings (Uketsu, 2023)
Focus on: The Life of a Showgirl, Six Months On
Last October, Taylor Swift released The Life of a Showgirl, an album that spurred a thousand think-pieces, arguments, and online flame-wars. Simultaneously the artist’s biggest selling and most derided album, to say it’s polarizing is an understatement. So I thought it would be interesting to look back on it six months on. Looking back, I’m impressed with how my initial impressions were pretty spot on. That’s not common with a Taylor Swift album. If anything, my initial feelings have strengthened. “The Fate of Ophelia,” “Elizabeth Taylor,” and “Honey” remain my favourite three tracks, with all three likely being in my top fifty of her songs. (For an artists who has released close to 300 songs, that’s far from faint praise!) For any other artist, an album with three songs that I really like would be a huge success. But, in this case, Swift is a victim of her own success. A lot of us have become accustomed to enjoying a majority the songs on her albums, and in comparison Showgirl just doesn’t measure up. I still like a lot of this music; it’s not nearly as bad as her detractors make it out to be. And if one of my less favoured songs comes on in the background, I’ll be bopping to it before I realize what it is. But for one reason or another, the album just hasn’t hit the way we’re used to.
What happened? I think it’s a combination of things. First, Swift is always very plugged in to how her albums are received, and often over-corrects in response. So, after The Tortured Poets Department got some middling reviews and complaints about it being bloated, and sonically too similar to her recent albums, it was no surprise that The Life of a Showbirl was a departure on both those fronts. It’s a concise (for her) twelve songs, and so a lot of the deeper cuts many of us enjoy may have been left on the cutting room floor. And, while a lot of us were excited by the initial rumours that its production was reminiscent of 1970s and early ’80s groups like ABBA and Wham!, the fact is that a lot of the production on those old records was a bit weird, and definitely not apiece with what’s on the radio today. So when I listen to the album on its own, I like it a lot more than I do when its songs, especially those beyond my favourites, appear on playlists. The production is just jarring and unexpected, and I definitely think that impacts people’s perceptions of the album. But just as importantly, Swift is now in her mid-30s; she’s no longer part of youth culture. Her millennial sensibilities no longer mark her as young and fresh, but as a little out of touch and ‘cringe’ to the younger audience that drives pop culture. Tied into this, a lot of this music is about her hopes of settling down in a stable relationship with her soon-to-be-husband. Even ignoring the bad-faith culture-war hot-takes about this, this more mature sensibility also separates her from the experiences of youth culture.
So what do I think about the album six months on? I think by most standards it’s a very solid album. Most artists would do anything to produce an album as solid as this one. It’s just not up to her standards, and also addresses themes that the arbiters of cool can’t relate to.
Matthew Root 