The Listening Club - 20th November 2022

Greetings folks, hope you're all doing good.

<oldmanvoice>Well, that de-evolved quickly, didn't it? I really don't know what to say other than "oh dear". After ten (fuckin') years sittin' on the same corner, watching the world collapse around you doesn't quite have the same allure it used to, does it, sonny?...</oldmanvoice>

So... here's the deal. I'm personally done with Twitter. I have no desire to grab the popcorn and watch a daily dose of infinite-dumpster-fire, or my friends reactions to it. Also any future pay-to-play tweet-promotion stuff that surely *will* occur there will very probably impact our #LC real-time conversational abilities, which are already flaky at busy times, as u well kno. (Yes, the situation may change, but for now, it sucks, and the outlook is not good, is it?)

So... imho, we should be grateful we *can* go elsewhere. Mastodon seems good, takes a little bit of getting used to, but basically does what we need, without the dumpster-fire and hashtag spam - for now anyway. I can see that most of our regular folks have set up and followed us over there, (one or two haven't - please give it a go and feel free to let me know if you need any help setting it up), so I propose we move to Mastodon 100% from next Sunday for (maybe) a "Hi Hello How Are You" vortex. Please let me know what you think. 

(NB If the majority of folks wish to stay on twitter that is fine, but I'm sorry to say I will not be willing to administer the account, someone(s) else will have to take that on. And I have no desire to run both simultaneously either - again someone else is welcome to do it, but I don't want to!)

Anyways, last Sunday I was away having a fucking amazing time at LGW, whilst @JimMcCauley was kindly sorting things out here, presenting @corin_ja and his fine pick of Half Man Half Biscuit's 2008 opus "CSI: Ambleside", which presumably charmed and confused in equal measures, as is their wont. Thanks to Corin for the pick, and for the flip of the frisb across to @brainspiritus, who is right here with tonight's intro...

"Happy Sunday, folks!

Over here on the Baltic Sea, we're seeing the first snow of the season this weekend, even if it's currently gone back to "nasty sludge". I hope you are wrapped in thermally-appropriate clothing, enjoying the foods of the December season that have been in supermarkets for months now.

Today's album… I stumbled upon this artist when they had a guest appearance on a podcast and decided to give their latest album (from 2020) a go, and first got stuck on the occasionally almost "arabesque" weaving of melodies, and the excellent delivery, which gets only better after hearing it a couple of times, when all the double-entendres start to hit. (It seems to be a sort of catch-up album, because some of the music videos are a couple of years older than that.)

I can see how this is probably not going to be for everybody, because it's … not doing the usual melodic structure thing much? Also, this is a person with a lot of anger and struggle in their life, so it's a bit sweary and aggressive. (Trigger warning: contextualized variations of N-words, I'm sure there's the F-word in there, Abuse of various kinds.)

This has songs that hit you in the feels, and songs that hit you in the _other_ feels, the entire range from airhorn to ballad. I don't know about cowbells though, and you know I can't spoil surprise metal guitars.

Drink: Gosh, I guess a couple of molotovs?"

Okaydoke. Download's here (right-click, save as), stream's below:

See you 8pm GMT, I hope.