Killdeer

Note to screen writer
Bambi needs some more pathos
Make 'em cry - killdeer!

Soak

After weeks of drought
Blessed rains soak the parched earth
The green will return

Rattlesnakes by Lloyd Cole

Lloyd Cole - now there’s a name I’ve not heard in a long, long time.

Back in 1984 when I first listened to this album I was a new student at Sheffield University and a hopeless romantic, in the sense that I was hopeless at it. Like Lloyd I would regularly fall in love and imagine scenarios where someone would be impressed by my literary allusions and knowledge of On The Waterfront, before realising that it was unlikely they would be interested in a computer geek with less than perfect skin, and I would go back to studying Pascal (the programming language not the philosopher).

Musically, this jangly guitar pop sounded great on my hifi that I’d blown half my grant money on, and I found that I could still remember all of the words 40 years or more after first hearing them. Lyrically, it's as arch and earnest as you might expect from a university philosophy student who's been listening to a bit too much Bob Dylan, but I definitely related to it at the time. It wasn’t entirely a surprise to find out that Lloyd was also painfully shy and dreaded live shows to the point where he would perform with his back to the audience.

Does it hold up? Nostalgia is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but I did enjoy the new to me bonus tracks that weren't on my cassette tape copy back in the day. Was it influential? Probably not, but it did have an influence on me, so I’m giving it 4 stars for old times sake.

Lamplight

Driving someone mad
By changing the truth comes from
That old film Lamplight

Power In Numbers by Jurassic 5

This is great stuff - hip hop funky beats, smart samples and powerful lyrics, a world away from the misogynistic violence of gangsta rap. The tracks explore different musical styles along the jazz/funk/rap/electro spectrum but the album as a whole flows beautifully. Reading the wiki also tells me that the album starts with the same bass riff that the previous album ended with, so you could play one after the other in a seamless mix.

The highlight for me was “A Day at the Races” which samples David Axelrod’s Song of Innocence, one of my all time favourite albums, and does it in such a way that in both respects and builds on the original. The a capella track DDT is also a revelation, and not something that you usually hear on hip hip albums, focusing attention on just the vocals and word play.

Dinosaur-tastic!

The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri

When Silvio Luparello, a respected local politician is found dead in his car from a heart attack with his trousers down at a local dogging site, Inspector Montalbano is given just 48 hours to investigate the case and hush up any scandal for the sake of his family and the party. On the face of it this is just a sad and sordid tragedy, but as our hero starts pulling at the various threads he suspects that there is more here than meets the eye.

He starts by interviewing the two garbage collectors who discovered the body, finding out that one of them had discovered a distinctive and valuable gold necklace near the scene. They also remember calling Luparello’s personal attorney and political crony Rizzo to ask what should be done and finding him curiously unbothered by the death of his friend and the potential fallout. 

Other things about the case just don’t seem to add up - who was the tall, blonde woman seen leaving the scene and being picked up by a convenient passing car? Why is Rizzo now supporting Luparello’s chief party rival? Why would an apparently cautious married man suddenly decide to risk everything for a sexual liaison in a public place instead of his secluded beach house where he would usually conduct his affairs in private? Are the clues at the scene just too convenient?

‘And Luparello’s case is one of those where things were set up to appear simple.’ ‘When in fact they are complicated?’ ‘Very complicated.’

This novel is set in the fictional Sicilian town of Vigata and the author Camilleri does an excellent job of capturing the atmosphere of small town corruption and decay, with run down factories, prostitution, warring mafia gangs and political croneyism. Inspector Montalbano is the archetypal dogged detective, digging into a case that other people would rather be closed quickly. He calls on friends, fellow officers and sympathetic officials that owe him a favour as the need arises before explaining the denouement twice - the official story, and the sadder and more tragic truth of the matter that Montalbano keeps out of the public record.

‘So you gave yourself a promotion, eh?’ asked Livia after a long silence. ‘From inspector to god – a fourth-rate god, but still a god.’

I enjoyed this, especially the sardonic humour of the inspector himself, as he deals with a very human tragedy.

Joy

I’ve thought about this
And yes, all my books spark joy
Marie can do one